CLIFF MCCABE

Updated 2024; I was born in Glasgow in 1961 and I have had an extremely varied and interesting life. I come from a very large immediate family and an even bigger extended family with a range of real characters sometimes good and sometimes not so good. I grew up through the Thatcher years in Scotland which fixed my politics in place for life. I married Eileen Patricia Keenan in 1980 and this is our forty fourth year of marriage, wonderful but occasionally, tumultuous. I have two sons Paul and Clifford, and four grandsons Connor, Jon Paul, Sean and Scott, and the apples of my eye my granddaughters Chelsy and Sophie. These six children individually and collectively explain to me the reason for my existence, it is to allow them to exist, because without them the world would be a much poorer place. My initial motivation for writing a novel was just to prove that I could do it, so I wrote "The Pod", a very dark portrayal of a group of people working in a call centre, in which I had taken a part time job, just to pay off some hefty credit card bills. It was a dismal place with no one really there by choice, there were occasional moments of light, but not many. That more than anything set the tone for "The Pod". Obviously I am biased, but it's combination of stark violence, fractured family relationships and gallows humour, reflecting the desolate nature of disenchantment with one's lot I saw displayed in that setting. I have since re-edited the Pod and toned it down a considerable amount, in an attempt to make it more mainstream, it has been republished on Amazon as "The call centre murders"

I changed literary tack with my next series of novels after a conversation with my better half. I had purchased a few self published books on Amazon to read on a Kindle which she had got me for Christmas in 2012. I told her that I thought I could write a story about my family growing up in Glasgow that would be funnier and more entertaining than some of those I had paid for. She wholeheartedly supported me but also pointed out the difficulties in using family and friends as unwitting or unwilling characters in a novel. So I tried to find a balance. I wrote a combination of truth and fiction. I hope I captured the essence of the personalities of my family members, but throughout the series of books the actual situations I placed them in were mostly fictional. Few of the situations really happened, most of them didn't but even those that didn't, could have. I wanted more than anything to capture the joy and the laughter we had, I didn't sugar coat the downside, we hit problems and still do, the same as any family, anywhere. It is my intention to bring this series of books right up to date , I am currently on volume seven which covers from 1986 until about 1996. So I have some way to go. But the journey through my memories alone is worth it, for me, anyway. I can only hope you agree. I will occasionally diversify when a subject captures me and demands to be written, no matter how severe the tangent, like "The Unbearables" a novel about a golf society gone bad. Again based on real characters in fictional situations, this time my friends rather than family. I have a scenario in mind just now for a Glasgow ghost story, but just like a ghost it's all in my mind at the moment. Thank you. Cliff McCabe 13/08/2024

Cliff McCabe

13/08/2024