Are blogs even a thing now?

I write for a living, just not in the way most writers first hope they will.

If you grow up loving stories, one day you might have a burgeoning desire to create one, only to quickly realise how hard it is to actually get your ideas coherently on paper. I first learned this while filling writing pads with bad Star Wars knock-offs that even six-year-old me was too embarrassed to show my mother. But where most people move on, would-be creators persist. I wrote ponderous short stories that I later burned. I shot terrible Super 8 film that I pray has long-since decayed into slurry. I recorded cassettes of gibberish, wrote cringe-inducing plays, blatantly ripped off RPG scenarios and sent screes of inanity to letter columns. All to try and get the words and stories in my childish head out into the world. And all of it was awful, but not irredeemably so.

Spoiler: he doesn't really know the answer.

Much later, long after the economic realities of adult life had intruded, I realised I had accidentally developed a skill with value. I could express my thoughts in words and arrange those words into sentences. It’s an ability people take for granted, including those who both do and do not possess it, ironically.

The first thing I was ever paid to write was a series of articles on experimental farming for emerging international markets, like ginseng and rambutans. Space opera, it was not.

Then I did media monitoring, blearily summarising daily newspaper articles against a barrage of pre-dawn deadlines. It’s now hard to believe it once took an enormous team of people getting up at 2.00 am to run a battery of fax machines and industrial-sized photocopiers, just so the boss of Ansett could read what the press said about him over breakfast. I imagine this is all done by AI now, which is good because no human should have to endure that.

One job led to another until I was actually writing for magazines. Again, nothing spectacular. I’d have written for Pig Fuckers Monthly if it paid the rent (actually, I think I did write their Christmas catalogue one year) because while nobody will pay you to write your space opera, they will pay you to write the crap no one else ever really wants to write, like radio advertising.

I have since written for governments of all stripes, evil corporations and the not-for-profits. They all need the same thing: storytelling. They might call it something different, not realise what it is or even understand it. Large chunks of my adult life have been spent extolling the virtues of handrails, half-price drinks on Tuesday and effective sewage management. I know more about road sealing than most and can be very persuasive on the societal benefits of polystyrene, on deadline and to a word count. All of which makes me a writer.

But the space opera and other stories in my head have never gone away and I’ve finally reached a stage in life where those economic realities have eased, and – this is the real trick – my confidence is sufficient to give those stories another chance to be born. That is why I have started this blog and the projects I’ll be documenting in it.

Thanks for joining me.