When Money is a Distant Irrelevance.

Very many moons ago when I was writing my fiction, an indie publisher (of sorts) took four of my short stories and said: ‘If JJ Beazley wrote a story about watching paint dry, I bet it would be interesting.’ That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it (even if the editor involved was training to become a Catholic priest and might have had as much literary nous as Dougal Maguire.)

But then this week my daughter told me that whenever I relate the latest goings on in my little world, I always make it an interesting story. She certainly has more nous than Dougal Maguire so maybe I should take the compliment seriously after all.

Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t go all out to make a living out of my fiction, since it’s the one thing I apparently do passably well. It’s because it was never written for monetary reward. I had something like twenty five stories published by different levels of the indie press – some of them more than once – and had two of them included in ‘best of’ anthologies, and yet I think my total earnings from the lot amounted to no more than about £200. The novel and novella which I self-published are available online at all the main book retailers and they’ve enjoyed a similar lack of attention.

And that’s fine by me. I was never ensnared by the pecuniary principle which so obsesses and rules modern culture, you see. I only ever wanted to do what I wanted to do at the speed and in the way I wanted to do it. Money never really entered the picture because my writing habit occupied a part of my mind far distant from that in which monetary reward lies.

But I did take up the challenge of writing a story about watching paint dry. It’s here if anybody wants to read it.