For four years we ran what was then Australia’s only short-story magazine. We washed dishes to pay writers and plundered stationery from universities where our siblings had access to office supplies. Everyone knows that magazines don’t make money in the beginning, but we were surprised to find it didn’t make money in the middle or the end, either.
When sales of the first issue started coming in, Andy mentioned that he might like to spend his share of the proceeds on a snorkelling holiday on the Great Barrier Reef. I was all for it until someone asked, “Don’t we need the money from the first issue to pay for the second one?”
“Oh God,” I said, “it’s a Ponzi scheme…”
In the beginning, we couldn’t afford an office, so we rented the corridor leading to someone else’s. Most of it was taken up by a large immovable workbench that was impossible to sit at….
