Transitioning To Becoming A Professional Author – Tori Haschka, Monique Mulligan, Laura Greaves

So Crisp Podcast

This episode is a little different than other So Crisp episodes you’ve consumed, the format is new to myself and my team (that makes us sound super professional, but in reality, it’s me and my adult son, who is a whizz with the tech) but I’m confident you’ll still be able to follow along. Instead of one, live guest, this episode features multiple sets of audio from some fabulous women.

Our guests today are:
Tori Haschka
Monique Mulligan
and
Laura Greaves

These guests are all women who made the transition from whatever they were before to published authors and novelists. Some of them even published books during COVID.

Now, it’s no secret I sometimes treat my own podcast like a therapy session or, in this case, like an opportunity to have a massive brain pick! And I thought, if I wanted to know how people made a transition from business owner or career woman or mother to published author, perhaps some of you lovely listeners would like to hear about that too.

So, welcome to Season 4 of So Crisp and let’s get on with the show!

The Crisp Takeaways

* Yum *

2:29 – Tori: “I became something of an accidental novelist. I have one terrible novel that sits in a drawer upstairs, but I started when I was 21, all about 21st birthday parties in Sydney. Um that was sort of a satire. I started writing that when I got glandular fever badly after a boy kissed me and didn’t tell me that he both had a girlfriend and Epstein Barr. So writing was a way to keep me in contact with my friends because I would send them chapters after I was finished. That novel will never see the light of day, but my most recent one came after I had my second child and I have been sitting on the side of soft play parks for a very long time with both children just tapping out little notes on my phone and fantasising about what it might be like to live in a village of women. I said it one day once too often to a friend of mine and she said, Tori can you stop talking about it and can you just write this thing? And so Grace Under Pressure was born from that.”

4:49 – Laura: “I was such a baby, I turned 17 in October and then I started my cadetship in January. So I mean I was a literal child. I look back now and think, oh I was so little and so naive and, you know, full of the wonders of the world. But even as I was working as a journalist, I did always have this dream of being an author and in fact I’ve only ever wanted to be an author. I never considered any career but writing in one form or another literally since I was four or five years old. I’ve been scribbling stories and poems and writing little plays and making all my friends act them out and that kind of thing.”

7:27 – Monique: “I’ve always been a writer in some shape or form. Since I left school, I wanted to be a journalist when I left school and I really quickly decided against that while I was in university. I don’t think I was ready for it. Then I wasn’t feeling like I was that kind of person who could go and just walk up to strangers and say, hey, you know, this happened to you, can you tell me how you feel about that? I found it intrusive and too confronting for where I was in my life at that particular point. Life often goes full circle. And so in my 30s I became a journalist and and spent quite a few years working as a journalist and then a news editor, and the favourite kind of stories I used to write were the feature stories, the ones where I could go and interview people about their passions about what they did and why they did it. You know, whether it was their prize winning cats or their beautiful garden or something like that, the cakes that had won prizes at the Royal Show. Those stories when you see people talking about something that makes them happy, they were my favourite kinds of stories to write.”

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