Caution ---> Winds

Last Friday, I handed in my notice.

It was not an easy decision. My job is a good one – I work for Central Banking, a small publication that brings me into contact with many fascinating people, lets me write every day, pays me for it, and has generally been a fantastically steep learning curve for the past year.

I don’t have another job to go into. When my notice period runs out in mid-May, that’s it. Out into the harsh world, with no monthly salary to guarantee food on table and rent paid.

This may be one of the more idiotic things I have done with my life.

The Plan, such that there is a plan, works a bit like this. The main reason I threw caution to the winds and quit was that I suffer from the great hubris I assume all novelists suffer from at one stage or another, and believe I might be able to write a novel that people would enjoy reading. I could be wrong. I probably am wrong. There are an awful lot more failed novelists out there than there are novelists.

I plan to spend mornings writing my novel, and the rest of my time trying not to starve to death - by which I mean freelance writing.

Related to this is the fact that I have always wanted to be self-employed. I’m not entirely sure why. It might be because my parents have (mostly) always been self-employed, and somehow I seem to have followed them down that path, even if I turned away from engineering some time ago. The thought of a) not having to do what someone else tells me and b) being entirely responsible for earning enough to live on (or not) at every given moment, is incredibly exciting.

And while working at Central Banking was certainly good for me – this mad plan would have been suicide a year ago – and I have really enjoyed my time there, I realised recently it was no longer exciting. With 23 years under my belt I’m not quite geriatric yet, but time is ticking on, as it has a habit of doing, and I’m conscious that I don’t want to be doing things with my life that don’t excite me.

This may be too exciting. We’ll see.

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As a side note, welcome to the new blog! I know, just what the internet needs – another blog. Still, I’ll be documenting how my leap into the unknown goes, and hopefully enough will go wrong along the way to make good reading.