In the ongoing saga of unpacking my boxes of books, I’ve come across yet another interesting (and practically historical!) find. Back in 2000 and 2001, I was living in Perth (having never left it – I did so in mid-2001) and I was just starting to get back into writing after not doing much since I left high school. It was good timing, because at the same moment, writing online was just starting to take off.

I’ve just unearthed my writing diary from 2001 – appropriately, it was a Dymock’s “Booklovers’ Diary” although they didn’t see fit to put an apostrophe after Booklovers – I’d added it myself with a black marker. In this diary I recorded the amount of writing I did for various websites and interestingly, also kept a record of how much money I earned.

Back then, my big loves were writing for two websites: Themestream and WrittenByMe. Both are long since defunct, and when I see how much they were paying me to write simple, personal fiction and non-fiction, I’m not surprised. For example, my notes tell me that during the year 2000, for writing just a dozen or so not-very-good stories about my unexciting experiences, vaguely cast as fiction, Themestream paid me over A$120. WrittenByMe seemed to pay me too, but I didn’t record the amounts, unfortunately.

And not about fiction, but nonetheless interesting: I was also writing for Suite101 back then, on teaching and assessment, my specialty back in the days before I started teaching ESL. In my diary I can see that I was paid an absolute fortune for these articles when compared to what Suite101 has paid me in recent times for travel articles that receive a whole lot more in pageviews. Unbelievably (I’d forgotten, but remembered once I saw it written in this magical diary) they even paid me US$150 for an article on John Dewey – it wasn’t that long, I don’t think, and we are talking nearly ten years ago so it was worth A$300 to me – and I recall that they actually asked several writers to submit the same article, paid us all and used just one.

These days things sure are different online. Of course, I have higher standards about where I’d write, but there are no magic sites that pay considerable dollars just for page views of simple, unedited fiction. Which on the whole is probably a good thing – I’m sure the quality of what I and others wrote meant it didn’t really deserve to be online or paid for – but it’s still a pity. If I could use a time machine and head back to the turn of the century I’d quit my day job and write my little heart out, and I might be a better fiction writer now (or at least more practiced) and have a smaller mortgage!

Do any of my readers out there remember writing online back in those times? I’d be interested to hear what you think – let me know in the comments.