My first forays into the world of work were as a journalist, I wanted to write and that seemed to be the easiest path to achieving that end and get paid, started whilst at college working part-time on the Hartlepool Mail Pink re-writing all the Sunday league reports we'd receive from the league secretaries, I also worked on the property supplement of the Evening Gazette and produced football programmes for several local non-league clubs.
Was offered the chance to go full time at the Mail but decided that being young and ambitious that freelancing was a better option, I became a stringer for the Gazette, Echo, Sunday Sun and others mainly covering non-league football, the courts, local events, and covered race meetings on busy days for the Sporting Life and Weekender.
Really enjoyed parts of the work but found it really frustrating as well, lots of wasted phone time and chasing invoices, so retrained whilst continuing with the sporting stuff that I really enjoyed and eventually moved across to the proper world of a normal job in my early 20's.
After that did some scripts with a mate, sold some ideas and jokes that were used on television and somehow in my early thirties through a friend of a friend had the opportunity to possibly work with Ant and Dec as they went from children's to adult television, by this time my mate was gripped with addiction and refused to meet anyone and wanted to keep all our stuff for ourselves. Always wrote comedy with my friend and felt I would be betraying him and letting them down by pursuing it myself, so my biggest claim to fame is I turned down the chance to work with Ant and Dec.
A few years later my mate, in a rare period of sobriety, and I wrote together again and had several meetings leading to a request for a treatment from John Ryan of BBC North, unfortunately the demons returned for my mate and working with him became nigh on impossible, the treatment was quite rightly rejected. I did some on-line music reviews and worked on some promotional material (Royal Ascot at York was one that springs to mind).
Pre pandemic I was doing quite a lot of travel articles for the airline magazines and was doing some stuff for the Loire Valley tourist bureau, including articles on Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci and Jacques Coeur among others, also some football and horse racing bits and some political stuff for a thing another mate does out of Germany.
In the next few years as I wind down from real life work I'm hoping to expand my writing and have a couple of ideas for some major writing projects that would require full time commitment, so prepping stuff for those at the moment, I've recently been approached to take on a media role at a couple of non-league football clubs and would like to rekindle the airline magazine side hustle sooner rather than later.
Have always loved writing and language and was convinced that it would be the way I'd make my living but I think because it's not been my main source of income that I've been able to continue that love of it and it's never become a chore, hackneyed or work.
There’s a good non-fiction book yet to be written about the most money earned for the least amount of work by creatives.
