Greg Shalless

Me at 50 and Pre-PRP

I am 55 years old and married to Elizabeth. We have two children, our son Shane aged 31, who has been teaching English in Japanese schools for the last 6 years and our 14 year-old daughter Felicity, who has recently completed her first year of secondary school. My first full-time job was as a Computer Science Tutor at La Trobe University and I have been in the computer industry all my working life. Until my recent retrenchment I worked for a software solutions provider in the Funds Management Industry. I had been with the company over 10 years and recently qualified, for the first time in my 32 year working life, for Long Service Leave, which I had to waste on what was in reality sick-leave for a very rare and debilitating skin disease called Pityriasis Rubra Pilaris (PRP), where I shed a layer of skin every few days. When I was feeling just about ready to go back to work I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis as well.

Despite my long career in the computer industry, I am still trying to work out what I want to be when I “grow up”. My initial plan to be a sports star disappeared very early in my life when I discovered that whilst I was quite good at lots of sports I wasn’t really good at any of them. During my University years I had dreams of being a professional punter as I was able to consistently win at it. The trouble was I was making about $2,000 a year from about 20 hours a week work. My ambition to be a school teacher was shelved when I realised how poorly teachers are paid – but oh for those extra holidays.

The idea of being a professional Scrabble player tickled my fancy for a while. There are some self-confessed professional Scrabble players in the US but I think I was making nearly as much as they do, when on the punt in my Uni days and for less hours worked. For the record I was Runner-Up in the 1981 Australian Scrabble Championships, but was technically and morally the winner. The non-Scrabble-playing head judge, a visiting English Professor from the US, twice flouted the rules of the game by permitting a word I challenged to stay, when the word was clearly not an allowed word. This was well understood by everyone who played the game at the time, including the woman who played the word. Apologising to me after the tournament, having been advised of the error of his ways, the Professor said he hoped it hadn’t cost me the tournament, which of course it had, but what the hell – it makes a much better story this way. Some of the other “careers” I have had a crack at over the years are: technical book writer; poet; radio presenter; game inventor (patenting the game Crossout ® cost me and my wife our house); Sudoku puzzle creator (I create the Sudoku puzzles published in the afternoon CBD Newspaper mX in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane); songwriter; and most recently author – hopefully a “best-selling” one.

My keen interest in and love of words began when my grandmother taught me to play Scrabble at the age of 8. Later Cryptic Crosswords fed my word hunger, but ultimately it was concern over our children’s education and the regular appearance in the printed press or utterance on Radio and TV of some appalling errors that prompted me to write this book. The success in 2003 of Lynne Truss’s wonderful book on punctuation, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”, convinced me there was a market for it and it had been a work-in-progress ever since. My mid-2008 chance meeting with David Cordover gave me the impetus, and my long period of convalescence battling PRP and Rheumatoid Arthritis gave me the time, to finally complete “Casting Nasturtiums”.

During that time I also coached my daughter’s Netball Team to a Premiership. It was one of my proudest moments.

Me (with PRP), Flick & the Premiership Cup