Nick BruechleI was born in Perth, Western Australia at the beginning of the 1960s - an extremely fortunate time and place in which to come into the world. Surrounded by sisters and with a younger brother who instantly became my best friend, I grew up in a noisy, oving family home. My education was mostly of the adversarial kind, received at the hands of various religiously motivated celibates. I enjoyed baiting them and they enjoyed beating me, so at least we all got something out of it. Oddly, among the lay teachers I also met some of the great role models of my life, to whom I am forever grateful. Having narrowly survived school, I studied anthropology at the University of Western Australia, and to my relief found compelling logical reasons to divorce myself from religion once and for all. As if the thrashings hadn't already achieved that. While I was thus gainfully employed, I spent a lot of time at the local pub, where I met the gentleman who would give me my first real job. I noticed that he wore jeans to work, and I knew that was the kind of job I wanted. As it turns out, being an advertising copywriter perfectly suited my skill set, my attitude and my appetites, and I have enjoyed a career in that crazy business for over 35 years. During all those wild advertising years learning the arts of brevity, clarity, persuasion and inebriation, I wrote some short stories in between drinks. But it wasn't until the late 1990s, when I met my beautiful and wonderful wife Rachel that I started to gain some of the maturity to address writing properly. In 2008, the Global Financial Crisis and my indulgent, understanding wife combined to give me the freedom to concentrate on writing my first truly serious work, The Psyman. Since then I have divided my time between freelancing as an advertising writer and pursuing my passion for writing. When I am not engaged in either of those distractions, I enjoy being 'hausfrau' and tending to our two idiotic but incredibly endearing cats, or slipping off to the tropics for a warm water surf. Read More Read Less