Kevin Smith Kerr

A wee bit about me:

I was born on the east coast of Scotland, and I was destined to have a thick accent that few would understand. That was until my father was promoted and offered a job in Rothesay, a town on an island on the other side of the country. But, he had misheard it, he thought they had said Rosyth, which was only a few miles away from where we stayed. So the entire course of my life was altered because my father misheard one word.

As a 5-year old, I was struck by a car. The last thing I heard was my mother screaming, convinced I was dead. A few hours later, I was hovering somewhere above the ceiling, looking down at myself lying on the hospital bed, my parents by my side. Later that night, I was walking up the stairs in my house and I recall being aware that something inside of me had changed; a new level of consciousness had been awakened, and with it came a strong desire to want to express myself creatively. I would reach up to my mother's piano and figure out songs, memorising the sequence of notes. The sounds were mysterious, the language unknown, and that fascinated my young mind. I would lie in bed, struggling to sleep, entire movies playing on the back of my eyelids. And, yes, I was the boy in class who spent most of his time staring out the window up at the clouds.

Many instruments, and many years later, I was staring down at the fretboard of a guitar and I realised that every song that would ever exist was there in-between my hands. I prayed to the heavens, Jimi Hendrix answered, and a song fell into my lap. At around the same time, I developed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which I later discovered was caused by anxiety brought on by a traumatic event. Although OCD wasn't great for a 12-year old trying to navigate his way through the drug-fueled 90's, it did have its advantages when it came to being a consistent and prolific songwriter.

I didn't always know that I wanted to be a writer. People are lucky if they know at a young age, they can just focus on it. I have heard many successful people being asked what they would do if they weren't successful, and most say that they don't know. Well, that was me, I was the 'don't know'. I moved from one thing to the next because nothing felt right. But what I did get from that was a life filled with a variety of wide-ranging experiences; the perfect prep for becoming a writer.

In my twenties, I travelled and lived in many countries around the world. I didn't always have an instrument at hand, and on those occasions, still desperate to create, my lyrics would become poems, short stories, screenplays, and later, novels. I was stunned and amazed to discover those moments of bliss I had been experiencing when writing songs could now be extended for an indefinite period of time when writing; the secret radio station I had been tapping into, somewhere out in the universe, that only I could hear, was, in fact, a world that I could live in, and one that has limitless possibilities.

I believe that when someone awakens their creativity they can apply it to anything. I am a prime example of that; learning music taught me how to be creative and disciplined in everything that I do.

My ultimate dream is to help people via my writing; to take the lessons I've learned in life and put them into entertaining stories that will inspire people to be better, do better, and hopefully avoid some mistakes that I've made, and witnessed, along the way. I feel it is our responsibility to pave the way for the next generation to be able to do more than we have done, and it is our stories that will inspire them to do that.

I know that I want to be a writer because it literally makes me jump out of bed every morning before sunrise. It is something I will always do because I love it.