The antidote to the "don't give up your day job" blues: Chats with career crazies and freelance fun-makers on how to turn what you love doing into income!
But again, there is that story of having one of the best explanations for not following your passion in the world and still not letting that stop you. Talitha Kalago battles a potentially fatal disease known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome. It’s a fight which could almost be a full-time occupation itself.
But while most of us only talk about getting a book published, Talitha has carved out the time to not only write but find an agent and get her work on the shelves. When I interviewed her, Talitha had just received her first royalty cheque!
This podcast, thankfully, is more about that journey to publishing that all authors face and how you can get your career as a writer started. Listen and enjoy!
I wonder whether I’ve done Matt Bond a disservice. The most important thing to him is being a great freelance photographer. He’s all about the quality of his work and building his reputation on it.
In fact, one of the first things Matt asked me when we were discussing the interview was this: Could I avoid dwelling on the injuries that caused his switch in career?
Frankly, I don’t need to. Matt’s already racked up an impressive list of photographic achievements since he started his business in 2012.
He’s done portfolio shoots for models, publicity work for comedy gigs and fashion shows – he was even the photographer for Sesame Street’s most recent visit to Cairns. If you have any doubt about Matt’s skill, just follow the links in the show notes to his website and galleries!
If that’s not enough, Matt offers courses that demistify the complexities of even basic photography, teaching people how to find their way around their digital SLR cameras!
Still, you tend to view those achievements in a new light when working them meant Matt was in constant pain just from standing up.
Yet when Matt discovered his new passion, he embraced it and let nothing, not even pain, get in his way. It’s a story all of us folks who dream of getting paid to play can learn from.
In the end, we did spend much more time on just how Matt went about building his career, from his first portrait shoots to how he organises and executes his projects. So please listen to a great interview with a skilled photographer who lets nothing get in the way of his passions!
(CORRECTION: I originally had the start year of Matt’s business as 2010, and I think I mentioned it as such in the episode intro. It was actually 2012 – which makes his achievements even more awesome!)
It’s easy sometimes to feel that you have so much on your plate that you’ll never get anything done. North Queenslander Saffron Bryant is one of those people who puts the lie to that belief. Saffron turns twenty-two in December, and in the last couple of years, she not only completed a degree in biomedicine, but she also wrote and self-published the first in a series of fantasy novels, The Fallen Star.
If that wasn’t enough to show people that there are no excuses, Saffron completed those two massive projects whilst undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour.
On top of all that, Saffron is going back for more of, thankfully, two of the above three things, working to complete an honours degree in biomedicine and the second novel in the Lost Child Saga. I just had to have a chat with her about how she got and still gets it all done.
(I might be far too late on this, but: Welcome, all you fine Cordelia Calls It Quits readers! I hope you enjoy your stay! If you want to know where anything is, please ask!)
UPDATE: As of 2014, Kelly is now fully self-employed!
Changing your career, no matter what you’re aiming for or leaving, is a scary endeavour. Embrace your skills and talent all you like, there are still a heap unknowns that you have to face and a lot of habits and familiar things that make staying where you are a more tempting option.
Freelance blogger Kelly Gurnett has made breaking free of those habits and letting go of the familiar things the purpose of her blog, Cordelia Calls It Quits. In each post, Kelly, in the guise of her alter-ego Cordelia, examines an aspect of her life that she either has changed or is in the process of changing. It’s a phenomenal way of keeping yourself honest; her Quits List numbers twenty-seven, with the most recent having gone up in the last couple of weeks, and she reviews her progress against that list on a regular basis.
By any measure, Kelly has been successful; she’s turned her full-time job into a two-day-a-week job and is blogging on several large life-change web sites. Naturally, this put her on my first List of People I Want As Guests, which made it a double pleasure to interview her about how she got to where she is now – especially juggling the day job with the dream job – and the places she still wants to go!
Mur Lafferty is one of the first podcasters I ever listened to. When I decided to take a crack at writing again, I stumbled across Mur’s podcast I Should Be Writing and downloaded as much of it as I could – which is a lot of episodes. Just recently, Mur recorded her 250th episode – and that’s not counting all the extra episodes she’s done.
I Should Be Writing is for people who want to be authors what I hope my podcast is for people who want to follow their passions. Though she has a strong genre focus, Mur interviews authors who have secured themselves publishing deals for any works, asking them about how they write and how they got published. Not only that, Mur gives all us wannabes a little moral support by talking about her own progress to published authordom.
That’s right; Mur Lafferty is also an author, with two novels (one published and one self-published), a series of novellas and a raft of short stories – not to mention another novel coming out next year via publisher Orbit Books!
But not only is Mur a podcaster, she’s a podcasting professional. On top of I Should Be Writing, Mur is the senior editor of the science fiction short story podcast, Escape Pod (for which she also writes and narrates) and host of the official podcast of UK publisher Angry Robot Books.
So I just had to interview her about how she gets it all done!
I bring you two interviews for the price of one download; a great pair of interviews with Malcolm Semmens and Amy Milligan, owner-operators of KerSplatt! Comics and Collectables, Cairns’ only dedicated comic book store and fast becoming a second home for the geek population of Cairns!
Amy Milligan and Mal Semmens.
I ask Mal and Amy just how much work they’ve done to turn a random idea into an operating business, how they balance selling their hobby and indulging in it – and in what new ways opening and managing a shop can actually be fun!
