Danny Gillan

About

As a youth, my main ambition was to find success as a musician. I’ve been playing the guitar since I was six, and, in my teens and twenties, played in and wrote songs for a number of bands in and around Glasgow, with varying degrees of failure.

As I grew older, and every inch lost to my hairline resulted in two being added to my waistline, I came to realise that rock godhood was no longer a viable option, but it has always stuck with me how much I enjoyed the writing process.

At the same time as seeking out failure and misery in the music world I have had a couple of other careers. Upon dropping out of university for a record third time (my mother is so proud), I got my first pub job. For five or six years I spent pretty much all of my waking hours pulling, and drinking, pints in several of Glasgow’s finest licensed premises. Pub work can be a great life, as long as you don’t mind the terrible wages and complete lack of career prospects, but eventually I found myself inexplicably hankering after something a bit more fulfilling.

Through a casual acquaintance I was introduced to the world of social care, more specifically that of supporting adults with learning disabilities and/or mental health problems. I spent the next eight years working in this field, starting as a voluntary music tutor and rising to the dizzying heights of senior management with a large voluntary organisation operating in the West of Scotland. Eventually, however,

constant battles with social workers about funding, and support staff about the importance of turning up for a shift, started to get to me.

Eight years ago I handed in my notice and went back to pulling pints, at least initially. I’d managed, through blatant nepotism (my sister was the manager), to get a job in a posh Glasgow hotel. For the first year or so I happily reacquainted myself with Glasgow’s drinking culture, but it didn’t take them long to notice I was relatively good with unimportant things like words and numbers, and I found myself charged with thankless tasks such as accounts, payrolls and answering complaint letters. This was not fun, believe me.

I soon tired of all that and, in 2006, returned to social care. Nepotism played its part once again, when a former manager called me with a job offer. The hours are awful and the money’s rubbish, but apart from that I’m quite enjoying it.

Anyway, back to writing. I had a couple of false starts. I wrote some brilliant opening chapters, establishing characters, locations and relationships. The problem was that I could never get past that first chapter. It soon became apparent that plot, of all things, was something of a prerequisite.

This threw me for a while.

And then I had an idea. What would happen if a failed musician (okay yes, me) became depressed (don’t ask) and killed himself, then got famous? That could be a plot.

From that initial idea I sketched out a plot revolving around the friends and family of the musician in question, and found I was able to explore a diverse set of themes including social care, music, familial relationships, friendship and mental health issues, hopefully with a decent dose of humour and sensitivity.

Will You Love Me Tomorrow is the end result of many subsequent months of toil and frustration, and was selected as the Scottish Region winner of the Undiscovered Authors 2007 competition. The book was published by Discovered Authors in October 2008.

Since completing the book I have written a number of short stories, something I hadn’t attempted before. I’ve found this an excellent way to practice and polish my writing, as well as an opportunity to experiment with style, tense, point of view etc. One of my short stories is due for publication in a future edition of Chapman magazine and another has recently been accepted by Bridge House Publishing. Another appears in an anthology produced by the Arts Council funded writers’ site YouWriteOn.com, and a fourth is due to appear later this year in Short Fuses, and anthology produced and published by the Bookshed, an online writing and publishing community.

I have now completed my second novel, Scratch. It tells the tale of Jim Cooper, a Glaswegian thirty-something office worker who decides to leave his job, sell his flat, pay off his debts and start his adult life again from scratch.

Maybe this time he can do it properly and get (or, rather, keep) the girl.

The fact that the girl is happily married and lives in another country, and her Bruce Lee obsessed father seems to want to be Jim’s new best friend are only the beginning of his troubles.

Scratch is an un-sanitised, emotionally honest and hilariously candid story about what it is to grow up as opposed to simply change age, as told by a man who doesn’t know what any of those words mean.

Friends in High Places

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES At barely nineteen, Angelica Donovan became one of the more successful winners of the T.V. show Our Next Super Model. The world assumed she was destined for a happy, fairy tale life as ‘Angel,’ the beautiful girl who was living the dream; sadly, that wasn’t to be the case. As the years passed, she flashed her million dollar smile to all her fans and fought to stay on top in a profession where you never knew who it was safe to trust while the fashion industry took big bites out of her heart and soul. And trust was a constant challenge for Angel due to the painful childhood secret she guarded as carefully as she did her heart. As a result, she never did find her true love on earth. When she wakes up ‘dead’ from a heart condition a month before her thirty-fifth birthday, Angel is at first relieved to find there is no death, just a change of state, like ice to water, and then she’s scared because her biggest and most important adventure is about to begin. Angelica is chosen to be an angel in training as a spirit guide for three souls on earth! Her assignment is to help two women to gain the courage and confidence to find, recognize and embrace the love that had eluded Angel in life. But her biggest challenge will be to save a very special little girl from the same evil experience that had poisoned Angel’s own earthly happiness and altered the course of her life. Will Angel be able to heal her own shattered soul in the process? And will the three souls she is guiding be able to recognize her, not as a ghostly threat, but as one of those ‘friends in high places’ we all have; the kind who often end up earning their wings.

Story Behind The Book

Media Links

Review - The Compulsive Reader

🔗 http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2219

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Interview with Danny Gillan

🔗 http://www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader/2009/06/18/Interview-with-Danny-Gillan

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Reviews

Review by Magdalena Ball, The Compulsive Reader, June 2009 Will You Love Me Tomorrow by Danny Gillan Discovered Authors ISBN-13: 978-1905108633, Dec 2008, Paperback How could you not love a book that opens in the midst of a first person narrated suicide and still manages to be funny? Bryan Rivers is a musician who is in the late stage of a suicide when we join him. It’s a hard opening to manage, but Gillan does it with ease, setting the black edged humour of the book perfectly. Though it would have been easy to turn the tortured, depressed musician into a cliché, the reader instead is treated to Bryan’s fumbling attempts to find a pen and piece of paper to write his wife, Claire, a farewell note. By this point in the story, Bryan is in the midst of overdose induced stomach cramps, and it isn’t an easy matter. But he wants to apologise to Claire. As he mentally recounts how he got to this point, it’s almost possible to follow him. In other words, though his almost accidental slide into suicide is a tragic waste, the reader immediately begins to like him and mourn his passing along with his wife Claire. When, three days after his suicide, record producer Jason Clements offers him the contract he’s waited his whole life for, it’s beyond ironic. But despite Bryan’s death, life, and good music, go on. Danny Gillan’s Will You Love Me Tomorrow is about as black as humour gets, and yet it never becomes farcical or loses the poignant edge. Certainly there is humour and a cast of characters that are real enough to remind you of your favourite boss or in-law. Bryan’s overly pragmatic and usually angry brother Thomas plays a strong part, as does the greedy Fortuna executive Phillip Doland, who is the one caricature in this novel. Claire, Adam, Bryan’s best friend, and Jason are all quirky and deep enough – grappling as they are between guilt and self-actualisation – to believe in and provide a good balance to Doland’s antics. The humour is sometimes strong enough to get you laughing outloud – from Adam’s crazy haircuts, Jason’s goofy attempts at impressing Claire,or even in the midst of Bryan's suicide: He couldn't believe it. Please let it be a piss-take, please. But it wasn't. He managed to keep listening as the rest of the travesty played out. His favourite song by his all-time favourite band had been raped! Desecrated! Mollocated! Violated! Buggered up! Ruined! No, not ruined obviously, there was still the original, but he knew he would never be able to listen to London Calling again without this tragic mockery springing immediately to mind. But underneath the humour, there is transformation. Claire, Adam, and Jason all grow throughout the course of the novel, and Bryan's very believable depression is handled with sensitivity, providing a thoughtful foil to the light heartedness of the interactions. The balance between the shallow and financially driven world of the recording industry, and the serious emotional toll of this loss on Bryan's family is handled deftly, never giving in to sentimentality. Each chapter begins with a quotation from one of Bryan’s songs, and although the poetry itself isn’t strong, it does help to keep Bryan at the centre of the reader’s focus. Though the book is never sad as such, the reader's privy perspective from the novel’s start creates a poignancy that underlies the zany. Will You Love Me Tomorrow is an easy, fast paced read, full of funny twists and pithy insights. There’s a musical spring to Gillan’s style that belies the seriousness of his topics, covering a broad range of topics including the impact of depression and death on friendship, love, how we move on past tragedy, the music industry, art versus public relations, and family jealousy. About the reviewer: Magdalena Ball runs <a href="http://www.compulsivereader.com/html">The Compulsive Reader.</a> She is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Before-Evening-Magdalena-Ball/dp/1904492967/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-9326603-7885261?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1185672347&sr=8-1">Sleep Before Evening</a>, <a href="http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/images/assessmentorderform.html">The Art of Assessment</a>, <a href="http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/images/quarkindex.htm">Quark Soup</a>, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, <a href="http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/images/cherishedpulse.htm">Cherished Pulse </a>and <a href="http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/images/she_wore_emerald_then.htm">She Wore Emerald Then. </a>She runs a monthly radio program podcast <a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader">The Compulsive Reader Talks</a>. Review by Shari Low, The Daily Record, 22nd Novenber, 2008 WILL YOU LOVE ME TOMORROW by Danny Gillan Jason Clements, A&R man for record company Fortuna UK, is about to make that call that every artist dreams of receiving - he's going to give musician Bryan Rivers his big break. One phone conversation later and his stellar plans hit a slight hitch - Rivers died three days earlier. Undeterred, he persuades Bryan's wife and family that when it comes to music, success and fame, a marketing campaign is more important than a pulse. Switch off that iPod and pick this up because if there was a chart for the best debut novelists of 2008, Gillan would be right up there.

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