247 Days

You can’t script these things. I mean, hon­estly, as a writer of com­edy adven­ture nov­els, who could pre­dict that Shane Warne would get me my first paid job as a writer?

And yet that’s exactly what has happened. With The Last Monk still in dry dock with the Mys­ter­i­ous Assessors, I’ve been cast­ing about for work to stave off the neces­sity to sell my body for tiny morsels of food and sud­denly, two days ago, it came. The oppor­tun­ity to write cricket art­icles for crikey.com.au.

It’s not about to fly me First-Class to Paris or even neces­sar­ily keep my body off the streets, but it does have two quite large things going for it:

1. It’s writ­ing for Crikey, which is widely and influ­en­tially read, and

2. Writ­ing about cricket for a job is like eat­ing chocol­ate for a job.

So I’ve writ­ten a couple of art­icles, and the first, about Shane Warne, has been accep­ted for pub­lic­a­tion today. Most of the stor­ies I write for them will be avail­able only to Crikey sub­scribers, but there’s a chance I’ll turn up in the pub­lic sec­tion too.

It’s been 247 days since I threw in a career in uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion to become a writer. Today I’m turn­ing the clocks back to zero.