I work hard for the money - but what's the cost?

7pm.

There’s nothing quite like the excitement of seeing your words in print in a nationally syndicated magazine. That’s how I felt four years ago, anyway, when Take 5 and That’s Life and Woman’s Day, became first my “other” job.

Congratulations, your story has been selected to feature in an upcoming issue of -- was the first email I received this evening, and I realised the excitement has gone. It’s been four years since I Made my Best Friend Fat graced the glossy pages of the place where journalists go to die – an admittedly rubbish story for a rubbish publication.

But by God, do they pay!

Twenty minutes work for $400 dollars. A few fake email addresses (last count, 75 or so), a pretend phone call here and there where you pretend you really are the person who set fire to your twin sister’s house for shaving your dog and having an affair with your son (or other such dribble), and a large collection of shoes courtesy of the Packer corporation.

How does one give this up? I am just a teacher, after all! But to be just a writer - How do writers just write in a capitalist society where there are shoes and cute cardies and soy lattes that now cost up to four dollars a pop?!

I can’t do it! I am a slave to money. My once promised one overseas holiday a year is on the verge of becoming two. I realise I have become a gen x-er who is living in the materialist, instantly-gratify-me mindset of generation y.

I must have caught it at school.

I’ll never write the novel while I’m still writing drivel and arriving to work at seven, just so I can keep on top of my day job. But I’ll never want to do it if I can’t afford to buy a new pair of boots every winter.

But enough of that. It’s time to check my seventy-five email addresses. Which will waste at least an hour. To see if I’ve sold any more shit!