When you pick up the apparent autobiography of a celebrity in Waterstones, you might notice, below their name (though in far smaller type) it says ‘with’ somebody or other; this is the person who has interviewed the named celebrity and written the text, organising it into a coherent, saleable whole.

We will work closely to produce a publishable account of your life, whether for general publication or for an unique heirloom. You may choose it to be a biography, written in the second person, or an autobiography, written in your own voice.

You may choose to get the final product specially bound, or I can advise on approaching publishers.

A year before my father died, I interviewed him using a voice recorder and shorthand notes, and this has proved to be a great source of comfort. For the Bath Chronicle, I have interviewed Ted Hughes, Tony Benn, Gita Mehta and Jeremy Guscott. I have also interviewed Les Murray for top poetry magazine The Rialto, and more recently, the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Jampa Thaye.

If you’d like to see some examples of my writing, click on the following links:

JOURNALISTIC SAMPLES PAGE * JOURNALISTIC PIECES FOR SALE

How we will work together
We will meet at your house, or a place of mutual convenience, for days of four to five working hours over a negotiable period of 10 am and 4 pm (bearing in mind that I will be typing and editing the work for four to five hours afterwards on each day). This will include lunchtimes spent together or seperately, by possible ongoing negotiation.

At the outset, I use questionnaire forms to save us both some time (which also saves you some money), and allow me to keep a working reference of your basic facts (numbers of siblings/cousins etc). I promise not to share your information, including that given either on or off the record. I trained as a humanistic psychotherapist from 1990 to 1994 and maintain best practice to protect client confidentiality. I hold enhanced CRB clearance.

A preliminary meeting may be arranged free of charge, to gauge if we would get on well enough to work together.

Fees
It depends on your own time-frame. It gets cheaper (and quicker) the more intensively we work, so if you’d like to complete it in three months, it’ll cost £7,200, working four days per week with three weeks out for my other work and holidays, and a week at the end in which I draw the work to a conclusion. If we take four months, we’ll do three days per week and I’ll need four weeks downtime over the period; if we do it over six months, we will work together two days per week and there will be up to six weeks out; over the period of a year, we will work one day per week and I will reserve the possibility of keeping up to twelve weeks out; I may get it done in a shorter time-frame, though I cannot guarantee it.

Over a one-year period (40 4/5-hour meetings): £10,000;
Over a 6-month period: (40 4/5-hour meetings) £9,000;
Over a 4-month period: (39 4/5-hour meetings) £7,800;
Over a 3-month period: (40 4/5-hour meetings) £7,200

Payment would be by direct debit and I will also charge for travel, (second-class/standard) or petrol, plus possible accommodation costs; I have means of keeping these down, possibly to zero, depending where we meet).

Earn Money!
You can also earn money by finding me somebody who would like to have their autobiography written. Once I have been paid my first £1,000, you will receive £100 or, if you prefer, credit for my services to the value of £120.