Author decided to do the sensible thing and followed her heart
I grew up on the beautiful Australian island of Tasmania in a society that was 10 years behind the times but in the nicest possible way. It was a fascinating community with a mixture of locals and lots of artists and craftspeople who came to settle from around the world.
Mum and dad were part of the back-to-nature movement that started to take root in the 1970s. We lived on three acres of bush land and had a menagerie with lots of different animals, like guineafowl, goats and peacocks.
My three siblings and I were all good friends and we'd cycle up and down the mountainside. We'd also pick blackberries and go up the road to the farm to fetch the milk urns, which were so full they'd splash as we brought them back.
School was run by the Quakers and as I think it was only one of two in the Southern Hemisphere, there were kids who boarded from, for example, Africa. The Friends School was excellent in that it had not only a good academic record but offered a rounded educational experience.
Bill Oats was the principal and through his own work with UN agencies we had these amazing experiences such as Sir Edmund Hillary, the explorer, and Mother Theresa, visiting us.
Bill would come back from his travels with the UN and teach us songs in the original languages of the places that he'd been to. As a result we were an outward-looking bunch and I grew up thinking the world was my oyster.
There were other interesting teachers too, such as Gavin Colbeck, who taught English. It was he who memorably taught us that a 'Diphthong is a Thong thung by a Diph'.
My biology teacher, Larry Mulcahy, taught me how to think. For instance, he said if you could smell something, it meant there was a very small particle of it up your nose. That did me the world of good, let me tell you, when I later went down the Paris sewers.
The second thing he taught us was that we had to be half alien because human beings hadn't been around for long enough to have gone through enough mutations to make us into what we are, so there must have been a massive infusion of DNA from outside.
Looking back I can see it was all so motivational and interesting. My French teacher was a Jewish emigre and she and her brother had been orphaned in the Holocaust. She started a club and good students would be taken to concerts which she'd buy season tickets for and then go back to her home, where she'd teach us how to make croissants.
The headmistress had lost her fiance in the second world war and was never quite the same afterwards. She was the archetypal scary principal. Once she made me walk around the quadrangle in front of my fellow students with my blazer buttoned up and with gloves and hat on, which we were all meant to do but never did.
Religious worship was another interesting experience. We didn't sing hymns but sat in hexagonal rooms and were told to wait for God to speak to us. Well, finally, someone got up and said: God did speak to me and said it was a beautiful day. We were so excited.
When I was a teenager, we moved to Queensland and the first thing I noticed was how good looking people were. Then I worked out that they came from a more diverse gene pool.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life except write. My parents said the sensible thing was to get a degree which I could always fall back on. So I became a lawyer, ultimately specialising in medical litigation, and practised for almost 20 years. I loved the subject matter, my clients and medical experts. Trouble was, I didn't particularly like other lawyers and the politics.
When I moved to Hong Kong in 1997 I decided to stop doing law and follow my heart. I'd always written for fun. I'd go away on holiday and scribble, and would keep the results in a plastic bag.
My first children's book was A Dirty Story then An Even Dirtier Story and then my first adult book, a humorous parenting book called Dummies for Mummies, was published last year.
Then at the end of last year I took the bull by the horns and decided to publish my third children's book, The Tale of Chester Choi, myself, which was a great experience so my fourth children's book is now in production.
From all that I learned a very important lesson: don't just do the sensible thing, do what you love. I strongly believe if you're passionate about something, you will make a living out of it.
I also love the wonderful reaction I get from kids when I go into school to read from books. However, I'd never decry my experiences as a lawyer because they've helped make me who I am. Now that I have my own publishing company it's been useful because I've been able to apply it to what I do now.
Sarah Brennan's new book The Tale of Run Run Rat will be launched at Bookazine, The Prince's Building, on Saturday, May 3, from 1.30pm to 2.30pm. She was talking to David Phair.
