The first steps

As a kid, I always wanted to be a writer. I remember learning that Christopher Paolini was the youngest bestselling author when Eragon

started flying off the bookshelves. At the time, 2002, he was 18 and I was 9. It was upon learning this that I decided on a new goal for myself. To beat him and become the youngest bestselling author.

I’ll forgive you if you’ve never heard of my work…mainly because it didn’t exist until 2021 when I first started getting paid to write.

Artists impression of me asking myself how I will make a living.

So, what happened?

Nothing really.

I went down the classic path. Stop me if you’ve ever heard the words before “That’s not a real job” or “How will make enough money to live?”. The strange thing is, when I look back, I don’t recall anyone in my life actually saying that to me.

My parents were always incredibly supportive and to this day encourage me with the belief that you can do whatever you want, you just have to commit to it. My friends who knew I wanted to write never mocked me for it and I distinctly remember one guy from school who I didn’t know very well would always ask me how my book was going with genuine interest.

I think a combination of pop culture telling me the above phrases, my own fear of failure and (in the interest of full disclosure) my innate laziness made me drop writing. In my own defence, I also got busy with school, playing lots of sports and having a very active social life.

So, I finished school, started uni, dropped out of uni and got a job. While I tend to look at the job as my own version of going for a 9-5, it was definitely not that.

The job was exactly as creepy as staring at this picture for too long....weirdo

I was, for six years of my life, a sleep technician/technologist/scientist (they kept changing the name for some reason). It was very interesting when I started, there were so many new things to learn and I got to interact with so many interesting people.

But after a while, I grew restless. Luckily, my restlessness made me look back over my attempts to write and I took it up once again. This time though, I realised that I had no intention of making a living out of it. With no pressure to get out a book, I could do whatever I wanted.

And I learned that what I wanted was to build worlds, with no concern as to whether I wrote a book. I designed myself a project so massive that I couldn’t possibly get bored. There were seven worlds, each with 3-8 different sentient species and each with its own magic systems.

And for 2 years I was happily building away. Coming up with the histories of the worlds and the species. (The product of this work is going live soon, though I will slowly be adding to it over time)

Life moved on and I decided to move towns. Luckily, sleep scientist is a very niche field and getting a job was easy. The problem came about 8 months in when the place I was working closed down and I lost my job. When I thought about what I would do, the thought of getting another sleep job made me feel physically ill.

Commissioned piece detailing my highly comprehensive description of everything that happened in the minutes after I lost my job

So what was I to do?

To this day, I cannot remember the 5-10 minutes between reading the email that I was going to lose my job and looking at the Bachelor of Creative Industries at the local uni. I suspect that somewhere in that lost time was when I made the decision because I remember being at my job and not loving it and then I was going to pursue a career as a freelance writer. There is no middle point in my memory.

And so I took the first step towards my current life.