Frank Riley

My life has been one adventure after another. As a fifteen-year-old kid I worked on river boats in the River Mersey, Liverpool. At sixteen, I went into the Merchant Navy and served on nine ships.When I was eighteen I began hitch-hiking through Scandinavia and mainland Europe. At twenty I worked on schooners in the Mediterranean, then hitch-hiked twice through Europe and the Middle East.I ran out of money on the first attempt to get to Australia in Karachi and ended up getting a job as a third cook on a Norwegian freighter which took me to India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the USA and Antwerp in Belgium.The second attempt to get to Australia (to see my brother) I ran out of money in Teheran in Iran and had to do a runner out of that country with the financial assistance of my brother. For further details of this and indeed all of my adventures, check out 'The Life of Riley' at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004J4W08 for the Kindle edition; and in paperback: https://www.createspace.com/3556150I'm a brown belt in judo, have done some boxing and karate.I spent twenty-two years as a professional ballroom and Latin American dancer and became a judge in both American style and international.I began writing over forty years ago and have written numerous novels and movie scripts and have recently teamed up with Amazon.com to sell my books. I currently have five titles for sale: three novels, 'Bell's Lot' a detective drama set in Sydney, 'The last Dance', a romance drama set in the cauldron of the dance world, and my latest novel, 'The Dying Sea', about Eco-terrorism gone wrong. My fourth title is 'The Life of Riley, a tongue-in-cheek autobiography', the fifth, 'The Reluctant Tourist' is a comical travelogueI wrote and directed a pilot for a children's television series, called 'The Magician'. It was a vehicle for showing the difficulties children have in growing up. The pilot dealt with bullying. Sadly, the television station for which I wrote and directed my work, went belly up whilst we were in post production.My motivation for writing is from life itself. I draw on my past, but I rely heavily on my observations of people and their motivations. I don't subscribe to the notion that people really change their character during their life - the so-called 'arc' in movie parlance - and it is that belief in the basic flaw of humans that gives me much fodder for my works.