Today on Galleysmith, I’m thrilled to host Gemma Halliday, author of Deadly Cool.  This is a story about a girl who’s ex-boyfriend is suspected of a murder she knows he’s innocent of.  As a result she begins to sleuth it all out only to discover she’s the next intended victim.  Please join me in welcoming Gemma!

Thanks for hosting me on your blog today!

On this leg of my Deadly Cool blog tour, I’m talking about my life as a teen.  And one thing that I remember vividly as a teen was being asked by adults what I wanted to do when I graduated.  My parents, God love them, were very free-thinking hippies who grew up to have four children, matching Volvos, chunky “car phones” and power-ties in the 80’s.  But they still held onto their core hippy beliefs that you could be anything in life that you wanted to be.  More than any other lessons they taught me, I thank them for that.  Because, as a teen, I felt like the world of possibilities was open to me.  Which is probably why I had a hard time settling on just one “what I wanted to be”.

When I was about 13, I was sure I wanted to be a concert pianist.  I had been playing the piano for years, and one of my favorite things to do to de-stress (And, yes, 13 year olds do have stress. It’s called homework.) was to sit at the piano and play for hours.  Even when we were dirt poor (before the car phones and power ties), my parents always made sure that we had a well-tuned piano in the house.  However, my dreams of concert stardom began to fade when I realized that piano players really don’t make that much money.  And it’s hard to be a cool starving artist in the subway when you’re lugging a baby grand along with you.

So by the age of 14 I had a new dream.  I was going to be a rock star.  (They made money and got to play music all day.  Score!)  I traded in my piano for a guitar and spent 6 hours a day practicing until I had calluses even Eddie Van Halen would be proud of.  (Hey, I warned you I grew up in the 80’s.)  Thanks to years of piano, I was already pretty good at reading music, so the instrument switch wasn’t that hard to make.  And after a couple of years, I was actually pretty good.  In fact, I was really good.  The only problem?  I needed a band.  And the only people I knew that played instruments were boys.  And the boys hated it that I was good… dare I say even better than they were?  So, without a kick-butt band behind me, my rock star dreams began to fade as well.

Luckily that was just about the time I started high school, and my very first class there was theater.  The idea that my body could be used as an instrument was incredibly cool.  Plus theater people were just plain fun.  They were goofy, funny, friendly, and almost like a little family.  I was hooked.  By the time I started attending college, I had made the decision I was going to be an actress.  At age 19, I packed all my belongings into my tiny Honda hatchback and drove to Los Angeles to make it big.

Amazingly, I did get acting work right away.  I was in a couple commercials, some TV shows, and even a few features films.  Unfortunately, even those gigs weren’t quite enough to pay the rent, so along the way I picked up a few other jobs.  To name a few I worked as an office temp, a pre-school teacher, a temporary tattoo artist, a 900 number psychic, a department store administrator, and a teddy bear importer.  I guess it was somewhere between the tattoos and the teddy bears that I realized maybe acting work wasn’t the most steady way to earn a living.

Luckily for me, I began writing and – what do you know? – it stuck.  I finally figured out what I wanted to be, even if it did take a few years.

So my question to you is… what did you want to be when you grew up?  And for you grown-up readers, is it what you actually ended up doing?

(P.S.  Join me on October 20th at The Secret Life of an Avid Reader for the next stop of my tour where I’ll be chatting about my first crush… and, yes, I’m naming names.)

~Gemma

As a child of the 80′s I can totally relate to this! Thank you Gemma for sharing some insight into your teen years!  Gemma Halliday is the award winning author of the bestselling High Heels mysteries and Hollywood Headlines mysteries.  Deadly Cool had it’s debut Oct 11th from HarperTeen, you should watch out for my review in the coming weeks!