Doing my Year 10 work experience at Busybird has inspired me more than I could have hoped. With 80s music playing constantly in the background, it makes the atmosphere even more homely and inviting, although much to the horror of Les, I only got the ABBA songs correct.
After spending the whole morning of my first day stressing about everything possible going wrong, the moment I stepped through the bright orange doors, the first thing that greeted me was Oscar the labrador waiting for attention, and the robot vacuum beeping loudly because it was stuck on the neon orange carpet in front of bright blue walls with shelves stacked with piles of books. Talk about colourfully chaotic.
Before I came to Busybird, I was just a high school student that was guessing how to do pretty much everything in her book and just hoping for the best. Now, I’ve learnt many things that I know will help me to become more successful and grow as a writer. I now know how to edit properly, as well as the sheer amount of time it takes to go through every page in detail and fix every little mistake I’ve made as I’ve poured words onto a page in a hurry of ideas without thinking about how they sounded.
When you’re fifteen and your dream is to be an author, most people don’t have much faith in you. They tell you to ‘find a better paying career’ or ‘just pursue it as a hobby on the side, but to find a real job that will actually get you somewhere in life.’ (No, Dad, I still don’t want to be a doctor.)
Most people don’t understand that not everything is about how much something pays, but it’s about doing something that matters and makes you feel fulfilled at the end of the day. Because yes, I could have a job that has security and pays well, but I’d always feel a lingering sense of regret about choosing something safe over doing something that I’ve known I’ve wanted to do since I was thirteen and wrote the first draft of my book in a black binder with a torch and a Harry Potter pen in the middle of the night.
Sure, sometimes staring at a blank page waiting for the words to come to you can be overwhelming, but when you look back on your manuscript once it’s done, you’ll be thinking, I wrote this. I actually wrote this. And that will be worth the time, the effort, the fighting with yourself not to give up for something easier. Because even though sometimes it can feel impossible to be able to put all these words in your mind onto the page and make them sound good, you’ll find yourself glad you took the leap when you get to type out the last words and look at the worlds you’ve built from your imagination.
As someone who’s always been obsessed with reading, I suppose it’s really no surprise that I ended up desperately dreaming of being an author. I’ve also learnt the hard way how much effort it takes to get yourself noticed in a world where there’s book after book to choose from, and sometimes nothing feels unique anymore, like all your ideas have already been used up by other people. So you need to do it better.
That’s why you need to keep going, why you can’t give up. Because one day in my dreams, someone may be walking through a bookstore, browsing shelf after shelf, and maybe, just maybe, my book will be the one they choose to take home, and it will change their life as much as writing it did mine.
And then it will have all been worth it.
Georgia Milner
Year 10 Work Experience 2025