No video. No improvements to the website. Nothing added to the system I spent August building to turn interested strangers into subscribers and, eventually, paying customers. The paying customers remain theoretical.
Instead, I now have nineteen chapters, 48,664 words and three people reading a manuscript that I hadn’t planned to write.
If you’re new here, The Long Game is my attempt, in my mid-fifties, to build an income online that gives me more choice over where I live and how I spend my time. I’m sharing what I try, what it costs and whether any of it actually earns anything.
Writing a book wasn’t on the original list. Neither was spending the best part of a fortnight trying to get five documents into it, but here we are.
The website still works. The emails still go out. Nothing appears to have noticed that I’ve been occupied elsewhere, which is either a compliment to the automation or a fairly cutting assessment of my contribution.
Three weeks ago, I mentioned that I seemed to be writing a book by mistake. It started with the notes I was keeping about this project. Thirty years in technology has left me with a habit of documenting everything, presumably in case someone later denies being in the meeting.
But when I read those notes back, a lot of them were about why I wanted more freedom in the first place.
The rules. The forms. The cost of doing what you’re told. The experience of running a small business and discovering that someone who has never set foot in it has decided how another part of your day should work.
That became the book.
It’s about the things we’ve gradually come to accept as normal, often without remembering anyone asking us. A doctor’s appointment described as free when somebody still has to pay for it. A visa queue measured in more than a decade. A fine for not voting. Another form asking for information you’ve already supplied to the people who sent it.
I’m interested in who decided, who pays, and what happens when nobody seems to be responsible for the answer. I’ve spent enough time on hold to suspect that last person doesn’t have an extension.
There are sensible reasons for plenty of the rules we live with. But I think we should still be able to ask whether they work, what they cost and whether the original problem is even the one we’re solving anymore.
Preferably without being given an eleven-page form to submit the question.
The sensible thing would have been to put the notes aside and get back to building the business. Instead, I kept writing, because this was the first thing I’d made in the project that I actually wanted to sit down and read back.
I did give myself one rule. If I make a factual claim, I need to be able to show where it came from. And for a few examples, I wanted the actual document printed in the book so you could see it for yourself.
This sounded straightforward when I said it out loud.
One example comes from the Medicare Benefits Schedule. If you’ve never had reason to open it, it’s the government’s list of medical services, the rebate Medicare pays towards each one, and the conditions attached. It helps determine what Medicare will contribute towards your appointment. It doesn’t tell you what it costs a practice to provide it.
Because we run a medical practice, I spend rather more time with it than I would recommend as a leisure activity.
Finding the line I wanted took about a minute. Getting it into the book meant downloading a 1,760-page document and extracting the relevant page. A sentence about card surcharges meant working through a 202-page Reserve Bank paper. One part of a law came bundled into the first of two volumes.
Five pictures took two days, at the end of ten spent checking receipts. I had imagined being an author would involve slightly more writing.
Then there was the evidence that moved.
For months, a Home Affairs web page had disagreed with itself about the parent visa queue. The headline said applications from February 2014 were being looked at. A table further down said March and April.
I had written the passage and left room for the picture. When I went to capture it last Wednesday, they had corrected the page the day before.
It now agrees with itself. March 2014. Still twelve and a half years ago, just a tidier twelve and a half years.
I couldn’t find an archived copy showing the contradiction, so I couldn’t include the picture. Apparently collecting evidence for a book is like photographing wildlife. The thing you want moves just as you lift the camera.
The other missing document was entirely my fault. A little while ago, I received a twenty-dollar penalty notice for not voting. It was mine. No government archive required. No enormous PDF.
I threw it away.
A man writing a book about keeping receipts had binned the one receipt he actually owned.
Where this leaves the business, I honestly don’t know yet. I’ve enjoyed writing this more than anything else I’ve done in The Long Game so far. That deserves some attention, although enjoying something and getting paid for it are two different things. I enjoy playing golf. Nobody has offered.
So I’m giving the writing six more weekly issues, with a review on Sunday 29 November.
There are thirty people on this list. If that grows past a hundred and more than forty per cent keep opening the emails, I’ll take that as a reason to keep building around the writing. If we’re still below sixty and fewer than thirty-five per cent are opening, I’ll need to rethink it.
That won’t settle whether the book is any good. It will give me something better than my own enthusiasm to work with. Either way, I’ll publish the numbers here.
For now, twelve of the twenty-four people who received the last issue opened it. The manuscript is with three early readers, and revenue remains $0.00.
I set out to document how I was building a way out. So far, I’ve written down the reasons so thoroughly that I haven’t had time to go anywhere.
One more thing, and it is an offer rather than an ask. Three people are reading the manuscript now. If you would like to be one of the next few, reply to this email with the word READ and I will send you a copy, with the same five questions I gave them and a date by which I would like your answers. It is unfinished, it is watermarked with your name, and it may lose its title. In return you get to tell me where it loses you before anyone else does.
You’re already on the list, so you’ll get the first chapter before it goes out publicly. When the book goes on sale, I’ll also draw twenty names from this list for signed copies. There’s no publication date yet, and the title may still change.
If you know someone who has ever put down a government letter and said, “Who decided this was normal?”, forward this to them. I appear to have written them a book.
— Mark
The Escape Report documents one person’s attempt to build a way out of the cage in his fifties — the real numbers, the mistakes, and what actually happened. No schedule. It arrives when there is something to say.
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