As far as I can remember, the first James Bond movie I ever saw was Never Say Never Again, which is not only not an "official" James Bond movie, but it was just dreadful enough to put anyone off the series completely. Bond is old, MI6 is a depressing relic of its former glory, and the movie manages to not only trample the luscious suavity of my since-become favorite Bond film (Thunderball) but manages to do so by being one of the first Bond films to turn up its nose at its own institution (Goldeneye was by far the most egregious violator, but that's neither here nor there).
At the end of the day, because it was a remake, because it showed a tiring and slowing Bond, and because it was not canon, Never Say Never Again became a sort of forgettable also-ran that no one need pay any mind. Even the comparatively slapstick Roger Moore era "official" bond films being produced at the time couldn't get NSNA a favorable review, and so freed of the burden of that ghastly film, I was myself free to go on to join the teeming legion of James Bond fans.
I love James Bond - not like the dude himself, that would be t3h gh3y - but the institution. He's a gentleman, a drinker, a lothario, a rake, a rogue, an erudite polymath and a cold-blooded killer. He's the sword of the empire, and to like Bond is to entertain a romance with order, hierarchy, and establishment.
To like bond requires a complicity, no matter how grudging, in the exploitation of the third world, of class structure, and of the most brutal elitism. While it also means a romance of tradition, culture, quality, and refinement, it is worth noting that all of these arguable virtues are exclusive in the extreme. To embrace Bond is to embrace what Leslie Marmon Silko calls the European Habit of Mind.
It also means that you're probably okay with pretty predictable three-act plot structures, which brings us to the point of this post.
Stories have three parts: A beginning, a middle, and an end; aka, the first, second, and third acts. In the beginning, you have a status quo which, by the end of act one, is disrupted by an inciting incident. All of act 2 is spent trying to figure out and confront that inciting incident (usually the first half of act 2 is spent asking questions, then at the midpoint the protagonist spends the second half preparing for action), which leads ultimately to a climax, dénouement, and a return to the status quo by the end of the third act.
Now you know how a story is written. There are about ten bazillion variations on this. In James Bond films, for example, almost all of Act 1 happens before the opening credits, e.g., in You Only Live Twice, we get about ten minutes of stolen space ship and James Bond being "killed," so that we can get onto his investigation into that stolen space ship. As another example, films by Wes Anderson seem to spend a great bulk of their length in the first act, allowing the action to slowly bubble up from inside so that the second and third acts overlap and resolve in anticlimax.
But the paradigm remains the same. Much like the "five paragraph essay" so hated by most new academics, the constant denigration of that form (that it's limiting, constricting, even fascist) can only speak in terms of what came before. Why three acts? Why not four? Who gives a shit? Go learn to write according to three act structure. What, you think you're too good for a three-act story? Think you've got some sort of revolutionary new writing technique that's going to turn the world on its ear?
Revolution needs context, and once an old order is overturned, the revolutionary becomes the status quo, in need of revolution itself. The western world has at large pretty much skipped this apparent cycle in favor of just selling books and stories that people actually want to read: stories with convincing characters and mappable plots.
The distinction most new writers fail to grasp is twofold: first, conventions are not meant to be binding, aka, the "screw you dad, you don't own me" complex. Conventions are meant to be supporting and stabilizing. Step one: learn three-act plot structure. Step two: deviate creatively.
The second facet of the distinction is that deviations from the structure themselves constitute a new structure. No, no, a thousand times no: you can create very deep characters by wallowing in the second act, you can explore process and growth by extending the second, and you can create horrible dread by recreating the third act as a sort of reversed first wherein the resolution restores a terrible status-quo, but in doing any of these you have not reinvented the three-act structure. Rather, you have used it as intended: a cultural trope or framework upon which to grow, expand and contrive.
Like ivy crawling up a trellis, structure exists to be used. To venerate the structure as is often the case with elementary school teachers, canon junkies, and short-sighted graduate students just looking to cram the next generation of freshmen through their degree factory, is to look at that bare and disused trellis and call it a thing of beauty. To write ignorant of convention is to invert the metaphor: that a plant growing unwanted and uncontained is a weed to be plucked out and tossed away.
So to summarize: Act one, act two, act three. There's nothing wrong with it. People are going to love and hate your plots whether you follow it or not, so you should learn to use it. I've seen this go terribly awry - the young lady who decided to plot a story based on a wiccan idea of recurrence in threes (it was utterly nonsensical to someone not trained to read it as such), the young man who wrote an illustrated self-referential story in which the main character was named "narrator" who still continued to narrate the story on the page (there was no resolution, only a very dull juxtaposition of two lame second acts), and of course thousands and thousands of two-fisted action yarns that are so eager to jump into the punching and blood and guts and screwing that they completely neglect to tell you who is so visceral, or why.
The old practices are not there to hurt you, but to guide you. Learn them and grow from them.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
How Dry I Am....
Today's hangover only ranks about a 2 on the Richter scale, so I may put something up later. For now, here's a fun Thanksgiving video to share with the whole family.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Happy Trollsgiving!
I'm just going to be real with you: I plan to be waaaay too hung over to post on Friday. I might rehash some old missive from back in the day, or I might make a half-assed stab at writing some flash fiction, but I would expect the most stimulating thing anyone will hear from me will be an echo of "Europe" coming from the bathroom.
Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving. I like to call it a distinctly American holiday, even though the whore bastard Canadians have one too, but of course they celebrate it at the wrong time. Last Thursday in November, people! Get with the program: program USA!
The most awkward part of Thanksgiving for me, is the big prayer before dinner. My dad always gives it, everyone bows their head for it, and I just kind of twiddle my thumbs and wait for it to be over, like prison rape, but without the cigarettes, but then again with the lifelong companionship of having someone to look out for you, care for you, make whiskey in a trash bag for you, and protect you from the Aryan brotherhood.
The prayer is usually a humble sort of thing - thanks for food, thanks for booze, thanks for everyone being here, an extra bit of tooth-grinding when the inevitable "thanks for the troops" comes around, and then we eat. It's usually not much of a tear jerker, and it's for all intents and purposes obligatory, and most attendees are happy to race through it (me at the front of the pack) and get to the "amen."
My own atheism isn't something I make too big a fuss over because I think that's kind of a dickhead thing to do, and I'm not usually the type to get involved in theosophical debate beside the occassional fun-poking at "invisible sky man," but it keeps coming up anyway. The fact that I'm blogging about this doesn't exactly make it seem like I'm anything BUT an atheist with some sort of bone to pick, but that's really everyone elses problem, and not mine.
Thanks-giving: it's pretty obvious that we're not thankful to the Indians. Was that the original meaning? Thanks, brown people, for the food so that we don't starve to death, now fuck off and go back to the woods? I really don't know. Every Thanksgiving I've been to in the last 32 years was white and casino-free, so I'm just guessing that we're supposed to offer up our praise to invisible sky man for making good things happen for us, like getting a job or getting married or not dying from smallpox-infected blankets.
It's there thrust upon me - like "in god we trust" on the money, rubbing my knuckles every time I go to shift my junk. It's there on the pickup truck in front of me as I cruise up 696, there on a billboard, here on a yard sign. Somehow the churches have become the least offensive symbol of religion, excepting of course those with twee little sayings like "God answers knee-mail" or "No Jesus, No peace, know Jesus, KNOW PEACE!!!111one," which are just tacky.
Also: abortion crosses.
When people call this a Christian nation, they're not talking about the framers who were predominantly deists, who could talk about the Puritain and the Mohammedan with equal romantic abstraction (just not the jews, blacks, or chinese) - they're talking about the colonists at Jamestown, Ipswitch, Salem, and Andover, the Jehovah's witnesses of Europe who, after having one too many Watchtower magazines ripped up in front of them, found enough financial backing to get a boat, sail across the Atlantic, and decimate the native populace before turning on each other in a jealous frenzy of superstition and bloodlust.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
As a corollary, I find many of the people caterwauling over this Christian nation business aren't such hot Christians themselves. They can quote conveniently political verses from Corinthians and Thessalonians, but couldn't find Corinth or Thessaly on a map. They can tell you that Jesus died for your sins, but they can't tell you much of what he said before that. They know of Eden,but in church they only Nod. They're assured of their place in heaven, and they can sure as shit tell you that you're going to hell.
So who do I thank, eschewing any named god in favor of an obscure eastern non-religion which has by and large been appropriated by hot topic and tattoo shops? How about those people who who try to keep this world going forward: the scientists, the readers, the thinkers, the writers, the live-and-let-livers, the nomads, the loners, the hermits, the helpers, the volunteers, the astronauts (especially the astronauts - space RULES!), the people who aren't trying to make the world a better place, but who just want to help without harming, who respect what I've long considered the most important freedom: The freedom to be left the hell alone. To not have to pick a side, to join in, to be for or against - to just be.
Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving. I like to call it a distinctly American holiday, even though the whore bastard Canadians have one too, but of course they celebrate it at the wrong time. Last Thursday in November, people! Get with the program: program USA!
The most awkward part of Thanksgiving for me, is the big prayer before dinner. My dad always gives it, everyone bows their head for it, and I just kind of twiddle my thumbs and wait for it to be over, like prison rape, but without the cigarettes, but then again with the lifelong companionship of having someone to look out for you, care for you, make whiskey in a trash bag for you, and protect you from the Aryan brotherhood.
The prayer is usually a humble sort of thing - thanks for food, thanks for booze, thanks for everyone being here, an extra bit of tooth-grinding when the inevitable "thanks for the troops" comes around, and then we eat. It's usually not much of a tear jerker, and it's for all intents and purposes obligatory, and most attendees are happy to race through it (me at the front of the pack) and get to the "amen."
My own atheism isn't something I make too big a fuss over because I think that's kind of a dickhead thing to do, and I'm not usually the type to get involved in theosophical debate beside the occassional fun-poking at "invisible sky man," but it keeps coming up anyway. The fact that I'm blogging about this doesn't exactly make it seem like I'm anything BUT an atheist with some sort of bone to pick, but that's really everyone elses problem, and not mine.
Thanks-giving: it's pretty obvious that we're not thankful to the Indians. Was that the original meaning? Thanks, brown people, for the food so that we don't starve to death, now fuck off and go back to the woods? I really don't know. Every Thanksgiving I've been to in the last 32 years was white and casino-free, so I'm just guessing that we're supposed to offer up our praise to invisible sky man for making good things happen for us, like getting a job or getting married or not dying from smallpox-infected blankets.
It's there thrust upon me - like "in god we trust" on the money, rubbing my knuckles every time I go to shift my junk. It's there on the pickup truck in front of me as I cruise up 696, there on a billboard, here on a yard sign. Somehow the churches have become the least offensive symbol of religion, excepting of course those with twee little sayings like "God answers knee-mail" or "No Jesus, No peace, know Jesus, KNOW PEACE!!!111one," which are just tacky.
Also: abortion crosses.
When people call this a Christian nation, they're not talking about the framers who were predominantly deists, who could talk about the Puritain and the Mohammedan with equal romantic abstraction (just not the jews, blacks, or chinese) - they're talking about the colonists at Jamestown, Ipswitch, Salem, and Andover, the Jehovah's witnesses of Europe who, after having one too many Watchtower magazines ripped up in front of them, found enough financial backing to get a boat, sail across the Atlantic, and decimate the native populace before turning on each other in a jealous frenzy of superstition and bloodlust.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
As a corollary, I find many of the people caterwauling over this Christian nation business aren't such hot Christians themselves. They can quote conveniently political verses from Corinthians and Thessalonians, but couldn't find Corinth or Thessaly on a map. They can tell you that Jesus died for your sins, but they can't tell you much of what he said before that. They know of Eden,but in church they only Nod. They're assured of their place in heaven, and they can sure as shit tell you that you're going to hell.
So who do I thank, eschewing any named god in favor of an obscure eastern non-religion which has by and large been appropriated by hot topic and tattoo shops? How about those people who who try to keep this world going forward: the scientists, the readers, the thinkers, the writers, the live-and-let-livers, the nomads, the loners, the hermits, the helpers, the volunteers, the astronauts (especially the astronauts - space RULES!), the people who aren't trying to make the world a better place, but who just want to help without harming, who respect what I've long considered the most important freedom: The freedom to be left the hell alone. To not have to pick a side, to join in, to be for or against - to just be.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 8 - Your Friends are not Characters
In the late 1990's and early 00's, I fancied myself a screenwriter and an independent filmmaker. To see how that turned out, do a quick search for my name on IMDB. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Right - and you'll find the same results for a lot of us who went out and saw The Blair Witch Project and stole a copy of Adobe Premier. That's not to say I'm embarrassed by the failure - indeed, it was really the wrong avenue for me to explore because the tasks of shooting, editing, and directing cut deeply into writing time. Every writer has to make a choice: to write or not to write, and if you are a writer, you must make your own deep cuts into everything that is not writing time.
But in the 1990's I didn't see it that way - I thought it would be a simple matter to wear lots of different hats and fill them all with my gigantic egg-shaped head. In order to make the most of the time I had available, I took some shortcuts with my stories, and the characters in particular, which brings us to the point of this post: your friends are not characters.
Your friends may have character, they may be perfectly interesting people, but it's an all-too-common young writer mistake to assume that their friends are going to translate neatly onto the page. You and your friends share a lot of inside jokes, a lot of memories, and a lot of communicable diseases - stuff that might go right over the heads of any potential readers, and not in a "wow, too smart for me" sort of way, but in more of a "what the fuck are you talking about?" sort of way.
Because not only are you and your friends in your own little world nine times out of ten, but unless I miss my mark, you have some pretty weird friends. You're a writer, you're not normal, your friends are probably nutcases too by the simple extraction of like liking like.
For example, my friends and I enjoy going down into the basement and telling make believe stories about elves and dragons and crap. We can't just come out and tell these stories to each other, because that would be gh3y - instead, we use math and dice to tell these stories. Many of us like to paint little toy soldiers for use with our storytelling adventures, and then after a hard day of that we go drink cheap beer in dark clubs listening to repetitive boom-boom-boom beats and dancing. No, none of this is done to impress girls, except for the girls who are already there, who are our friends, and who are no longer impressed by us.
Maybe that actually sounds like fun - I don't know. But what I do know is that a transcribed conversation between any two of us would make for a lousy read. Why? Because my friends and I (and likely you and yours) have known each other for decades. I can call my buddy Mike and have an entire conversation wherein we simply impersonate old high school teachers, and to us it's a riot, and I can say "OMG my friends are so hilarious!" but, when I take the time to explain who Carol Kachmar was and why she talked like Dame Edna, and why she had a fixation with telling us we were all going to fail, well, it's boring me just thinking about it...and I'm not even you.
The urge to write a friend in is powerful, but you have to fight it. At the same time, you can't ignore the material life hands you. If you have a friend who has a weird hobby and a peculiar way of talking, well, that's characterful and interesting, and basically the entire premise behind Seinfeld. But, if you are repeating verbatim a conversation you've had about the particulars of that zany Judy from the office, well, it's very possible that only you and your friend find that interesting. If you're wondering who Judy is, or if you don't know who Judy is, or if your reading sort of skipped a beat with that weird reference, then you get my point.
The trick is to find the archetype in your friends, because so much of fiction depends on them. Stories need heroes, villains, helpers, teachers, and all of these little character elements that are themselves a hidden and nearly subconscious language. We know who the hero is by page ten, and he's explained his problem by page fifteen. Can your friend get to the point in six thousand words? Sure, but not if you're spending all your page space telling me about the crazy wacky things at band camp and, oh man, dude, you totally just had to be there.
Naturally this is hard. Our experience is precious to us, and we want to record things for posterity, to reflect the truth of the event - but if the event can only live in the sealed bell jar of transcription, then of what use is it? If your friend wally is just so totally weird that I'd have to know him to "get" him, why tell me about him at all?
Right - and you'll find the same results for a lot of us who went out and saw The Blair Witch Project and stole a copy of Adobe Premier. That's not to say I'm embarrassed by the failure - indeed, it was really the wrong avenue for me to explore because the tasks of shooting, editing, and directing cut deeply into writing time. Every writer has to make a choice: to write or not to write, and if you are a writer, you must make your own deep cuts into everything that is not writing time.
But in the 1990's I didn't see it that way - I thought it would be a simple matter to wear lots of different hats and fill them all with my gigantic egg-shaped head. In order to make the most of the time I had available, I took some shortcuts with my stories, and the characters in particular, which brings us to the point of this post: your friends are not characters.
Your friends may have character, they may be perfectly interesting people, but it's an all-too-common young writer mistake to assume that their friends are going to translate neatly onto the page. You and your friends share a lot of inside jokes, a lot of memories, and a lot of communicable diseases - stuff that might go right over the heads of any potential readers, and not in a "wow, too smart for me" sort of way, but in more of a "what the fuck are you talking about?" sort of way.
Because not only are you and your friends in your own little world nine times out of ten, but unless I miss my mark, you have some pretty weird friends. You're a writer, you're not normal, your friends are probably nutcases too by the simple extraction of like liking like.
For example, my friends and I enjoy going down into the basement and telling make believe stories about elves and dragons and crap. We can't just come out and tell these stories to each other, because that would be gh3y - instead, we use math and dice to tell these stories. Many of us like to paint little toy soldiers for use with our storytelling adventures, and then after a hard day of that we go drink cheap beer in dark clubs listening to repetitive boom-boom-boom beats and dancing. No, none of this is done to impress girls, except for the girls who are already there, who are our friends, and who are no longer impressed by us.
Maybe that actually sounds like fun - I don't know. But what I do know is that a transcribed conversation between any two of us would make for a lousy read. Why? Because my friends and I (and likely you and yours) have known each other for decades. I can call my buddy Mike and have an entire conversation wherein we simply impersonate old high school teachers, and to us it's a riot, and I can say "OMG my friends are so hilarious!" but, when I take the time to explain who Carol Kachmar was and why she talked like Dame Edna, and why she had a fixation with telling us we were all going to fail, well, it's boring me just thinking about it...and I'm not even you.
The urge to write a friend in is powerful, but you have to fight it. At the same time, you can't ignore the material life hands you. If you have a friend who has a weird hobby and a peculiar way of talking, well, that's characterful and interesting, and basically the entire premise behind Seinfeld. But, if you are repeating verbatim a conversation you've had about the particulars of that zany Judy from the office, well, it's very possible that only you and your friend find that interesting. If you're wondering who Judy is, or if you don't know who Judy is, or if your reading sort of skipped a beat with that weird reference, then you get my point.
The trick is to find the archetype in your friends, because so much of fiction depends on them. Stories need heroes, villains, helpers, teachers, and all of these little character elements that are themselves a hidden and nearly subconscious language. We know who the hero is by page ten, and he's explained his problem by page fifteen. Can your friend get to the point in six thousand words? Sure, but not if you're spending all your page space telling me about the crazy wacky things at band camp and, oh man, dude, you totally just had to be there.
Naturally this is hard. Our experience is precious to us, and we want to record things for posterity, to reflect the truth of the event - but if the event can only live in the sealed bell jar of transcription, then of what use is it? If your friend wally is just so totally weird that I'd have to know him to "get" him, why tell me about him at all?
Friday, November 20, 2009
Mo' Pepperoni, Mo' Problems
Today I'm going into work at the ol' pizzeria for what should be the last time for a long while. This of course necessitates a "rebranding" of my blog and personal website as I am no longer "one of the most over-educated pizza cooks in the world," but rather, a "textbook editor with just about the right amount of education, maybe a little light on experience, but with a plucky can-do attitude." Career-wise, I'm just about where I ought to be.
Unfortunately, there's nothing funny about that.
Previously, I was a tweed-jacketed bow-tied professor type forced to labor in a menial job for low wages, and that was hilarious because of course I'd gone to college and gotten all stuffy and was like "I say, I simply do not fathom how to go about these many and sundry labours," and all my coworkers were all like "no, you gotta relax and be cool man, and learn how to let your hair down and dance, DANCE!" and along the way I made some friends, drank some colorful and fruity tequila drinks, and then we all rode a five-person tandem bicycle down a hill, kicking our feet out to the side and shouting "weeee."
In short, i was alive with flavor.
I'll never forget my time as a cook, mostly because I can never shake the feeling that I might someday have to be one again. I've said goodbye to restaurant work many times in the past - in high school when I went to work in the video store, when I left college to become a security guard, and then when I went to grad school. In all of those cases, some pizzeria somewhere had its door open for me when I had to come back, and for this I am genuinely and sincerely thankful. No there's no joke there. Here, have some horse pop.
We all fantasize about quitting a job in some big dramatic fashion, like telling our bosses what we really think of them, or finally sweeping that hot girl in HR off her feet, or burning the place to the ground and dancing on the charred skeletons of those coworkers who mocked you, mocked you, for so very very long but who will never mock again because with their slaughter you have appeased Vorgoth, black lord of the east, and when you hear the siren's wail you know that it is the dire bleating of Vorgoth's immortal flock, his dread goats of murder who come to release you from this sickly mortal coil, yes, by the seven moons of Hadleareath, it's working, IT'S WORKING, I CAN FEEL THE POWER! - but so few of us do.
No, mostly we hope for a good reference, or a safe port to which we can return should the need arise. I think instinctively most of us know that any job, whether it be one we despise, one we love but have to leave, or one we just tolerate, might not seem so hard, so poor, or so boring in the future. I myself spent a lot of time at the end of summer applying for help desk jobs when I would in fact rather cook - a truth reflected in the fact that I cooked rather than fix computers for the last few months. Also, I'm an MCP in Windows NT 4.0 - who even uses that anymore?
My old man has this wooden placard hanging in his office, engraved with a quotation from Elbert Hubbard (himself a rather interesting character worthy of more mention than I'm giving him here), and the quotation reads:
"Remember this: If you work for a man, in Heaven's name, work for him. If he pays you wages which supply you bread and butter, work for him; speak well of him; stand by the institution he represents. If put to a pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must vilify, condemn and eternally disparage - resign your position, and when you are on the outside, damn to your heart's content, but as long as you are part of the institution do not condemn it."
It took me quite a while to learn what that meant, despite reading it at least once a week since I was old enough to do so. I used to think it was a lot of corporate yes-manism, a lot of "ra ra go work for the moneyed classes as they break the backs of the poor," but that was then, and as I get older I'm sympathetic.
I think back to bashing the people at one of my old employers for being middle-class drones, to badmouthing and then quitting one company in a huff because the man the next desk over was paid more for the same work, and to numerous petty thefts against the people that basically kept me from starving, and though I'm hardly ashamed, I certainly feel like I've got some bad karma coming my way some day.
I don't burn bridges. I don't storm out. I do tell the boss what I really think, because if you don't respect someone, if you can't get along with them, and if you can't vest some sort of interest in your work, then you shouldn't be doing it. I say this pretty much every week about writing, but it's no less true for the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker.
Now, I'm going to spend the remainder of my morning editing textbooks, and then I will go to make pizza - once more unto the breech! If you are in Royal Oak tonight, go ahead and drop by: Buddy's Pizza, Woodward, just north of Normandy. I won't "hook you up" as a matter ofprincipal principle, but I'll make you some good food and I'll appreciate the thought.
Also, there's a tip jar - don't act like you don't know what it's for.
Unfortunately, there's nothing funny about that.
Previously, I was a tweed-jacketed bow-tied professor type forced to labor in a menial job for low wages, and that was hilarious because of course I'd gone to college and gotten all stuffy and was like "I say, I simply do not fathom how to go about these many and sundry labours," and all my coworkers were all like "no, you gotta relax and be cool man, and learn how to let your hair down and dance, DANCE!" and along the way I made some friends, drank some colorful and fruity tequila drinks, and then we all rode a five-person tandem bicycle down a hill, kicking our feet out to the side and shouting "weeee."
In short, i was alive with flavor.
I'll never forget my time as a cook, mostly because I can never shake the feeling that I might someday have to be one again. I've said goodbye to restaurant work many times in the past - in high school when I went to work in the video store, when I left college to become a security guard, and then when I went to grad school. In all of those cases, some pizzeria somewhere had its door open for me when I had to come back, and for this I am genuinely and sincerely thankful. No there's no joke there. Here, have some horse pop.
We all fantasize about quitting a job in some big dramatic fashion, like telling our bosses what we really think of them, or finally sweeping that hot girl in HR off her feet, or burning the place to the ground and dancing on the charred skeletons of those coworkers who mocked you, mocked you, for so very very long but who will never mock again because with their slaughter you have appeased Vorgoth, black lord of the east, and when you hear the siren's wail you know that it is the dire bleating of Vorgoth's immortal flock, his dread goats of murder who come to release you from this sickly mortal coil, yes, by the seven moons of Hadleareath, it's working, IT'S WORKING, I CAN FEEL THE POWER! - but so few of us do.
No, mostly we hope for a good reference, or a safe port to which we can return should the need arise. I think instinctively most of us know that any job, whether it be one we despise, one we love but have to leave, or one we just tolerate, might not seem so hard, so poor, or so boring in the future. I myself spent a lot of time at the end of summer applying for help desk jobs when I would in fact rather cook - a truth reflected in the fact that I cooked rather than fix computers for the last few months. Also, I'm an MCP in Windows NT 4.0 - who even uses that anymore?
My old man has this wooden placard hanging in his office, engraved with a quotation from Elbert Hubbard (himself a rather interesting character worthy of more mention than I'm giving him here), and the quotation reads:
"Remember this: If you work for a man, in Heaven's name, work for him. If he pays you wages which supply you bread and butter, work for him; speak well of him; stand by the institution he represents. If put to a pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must vilify, condemn and eternally disparage - resign your position, and when you are on the outside, damn to your heart's content, but as long as you are part of the institution do not condemn it."
It took me quite a while to learn what that meant, despite reading it at least once a week since I was old enough to do so. I used to think it was a lot of corporate yes-manism, a lot of "ra ra go work for the moneyed classes as they break the backs of the poor," but that was then, and as I get older I'm sympathetic.
I think back to bashing the people at one of my old employers for being middle-class drones, to badmouthing and then quitting one company in a huff because the man the next desk over was paid more for the same work, and to numerous petty thefts against the people that basically kept me from starving, and though I'm hardly ashamed, I certainly feel like I've got some bad karma coming my way some day.
I don't burn bridges. I don't storm out. I do tell the boss what I really think, because if you don't respect someone, if you can't get along with them, and if you can't vest some sort of interest in your work, then you shouldn't be doing it. I say this pretty much every week about writing, but it's no less true for the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker.
Now, I'm going to spend the remainder of my morning editing textbooks, and then I will go to make pizza - once more unto the breech! If you are in Royal Oak tonight, go ahead and drop by: Buddy's Pizza, Woodward, just north of Normandy. I won't "hook you up" as a matter of
Also, there's a tip jar - don't act like you don't know what it's for.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Late Post
Post going up later - working to deadline today. I used to be so good about writing these in advance!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give it, Volume 6: Freak, F*** what ya heard, back off the booze!
There's this popular misconception of writers that, as a stumbling drunk, I've done little to dispel - namely, that we're a bunch of stumbling drunks. There's no denying that a lot of writers drink a lot. Hemingway has a gin-soaked reputation, but was probably eclipsed by Fitzgerald in raw quantity. Bukowski? More like booze-kowski, amirite? Raymond Carver only put down his cigarette to take a swig of whiskey - anyway, there's this long tradition of lushness which I, a complete lush am going to advocate you skip.
Booze does many wonderful things: it loosens you up at parties, it makes you more charming, clever, funny, and attractive to the opposite sex, it makes you a better dancer, and it kills off all your weak brain cells. It reminds you to text girls in the middle of the night (so that they don't think you've forgotten about them) and it makes you a better driver. This is all a scientific fact.
What's also totally factual is that it will fuck up your typing. If you're one of those pretentious shits who writes everything out longhand, well, it fucks that up too. Certainly, this seems like the sort of thing that a good Spellchecker should handle, but it won't. Rather, it might fix the words, but it can't fix what you actually write - that nonsensical stream of drunken-ese babble that makes sense only to a slobbering, slurring, lazy-eyed version of yourself who you will be embarrassed to say you know in the morning.
The typing itself is a colossal distraction. You will catch about every third word that you fuck up, and it will be enough. You will spend valuable writing time hunting and pecking for the backspace key, and then when you look back up at the screen (provided you don't vomit on yourself from all the sudden moving around) you will have totally lost your train of thought. While this is a good thing for the world at large, it's terrible for you and your attempt to finish something today, TODAY man, no more putting it off!
Now typing aside, as I mentioned, what you write will not make a goddamn lick of sense. Alcohol is a dissociative drug, which means that in addition to dulling the pain of every day life, it literally dulls your senses. You can see something, but not really perceive it. You can hear something without listening. Your every experience becomes mediated through a haze of some really loud guy telling an impossibly boring story to a girl who is way out of his league.
Hint: the guy is you. The girl is also a guy.
So you find yourself unable to write and with nothing to actually write about because for all the value of your experience, you might as well be watching television. You're forcing a haze between yourself and your work, as well as yourself and the world, which you will not be able to write around unless you have years and years of experience doing it straight, or learning to see through the veil.
Hemingway could do it. Fitzgerald could do it. Buchowski wrote about the veil itself. Carver had an editor. You can't, you aren't, you don't. Drink on your own time, but when it's time to pound keys, stick to coffee.
I can't in good conscience ever tell someone not to drink, because I pretty much drink all the time, but in the tradition of all those literary greats mentioned above (except Buchowski, m'thinks), I put the sauce aside when it's time to write, and you'll find that's true of most writers, hardened alcohoics or not. Booze is for play time, or for speeding through the long hours of a dull day.
The writing should be your passion, your raison d'etre, and comparing it to another passion might help this analogy along.
If you were out with a lady and it was a sure thing, how much would you have to drink? Enough to loosen up a bit, relax, and get out on the dance floor? Or so much that your dick went all floppy, you throw up on your shoes, and then piss yourself and cry as she takes pictures of you to post on the internet?
Thought so. Now put a cork in it and get to work!
Booze does many wonderful things: it loosens you up at parties, it makes you more charming, clever, funny, and attractive to the opposite sex, it makes you a better dancer, and it kills off all your weak brain cells. It reminds you to text girls in the middle of the night (so that they don't think you've forgotten about them) and it makes you a better driver. This is all a scientific fact.
What's also totally factual is that it will fuck up your typing. If you're one of those pretentious shits who writes everything out longhand, well, it fucks that up too. Certainly, this seems like the sort of thing that a good Spellchecker should handle, but it won't. Rather, it might fix the words, but it can't fix what you actually write - that nonsensical stream of drunken-ese babble that makes sense only to a slobbering, slurring, lazy-eyed version of yourself who you will be embarrassed to say you know in the morning.
The typing itself is a colossal distraction. You will catch about every third word that you fuck up, and it will be enough. You will spend valuable writing time hunting and pecking for the backspace key, and then when you look back up at the screen (provided you don't vomit on yourself from all the sudden moving around) you will have totally lost your train of thought. While this is a good thing for the world at large, it's terrible for you and your attempt to finish something today, TODAY man, no more putting it off!
Now typing aside, as I mentioned, what you write will not make a goddamn lick of sense. Alcohol is a dissociative drug, which means that in addition to dulling the pain of every day life, it literally dulls your senses. You can see something, but not really perceive it. You can hear something without listening. Your every experience becomes mediated through a haze of some really loud guy telling an impossibly boring story to a girl who is way out of his league.
Hint: the guy is you. The girl is also a guy.
So you find yourself unable to write and with nothing to actually write about because for all the value of your experience, you might as well be watching television. You're forcing a haze between yourself and your work, as well as yourself and the world, which you will not be able to write around unless you have years and years of experience doing it straight, or learning to see through the veil.
Hemingway could do it. Fitzgerald could do it. Buchowski wrote about the veil itself. Carver had an editor. You can't, you aren't, you don't. Drink on your own time, but when it's time to pound keys, stick to coffee.
I can't in good conscience ever tell someone not to drink, because I pretty much drink all the time, but in the tradition of all those literary greats mentioned above (except Buchowski, m'thinks), I put the sauce aside when it's time to write, and you'll find that's true of most writers, hardened alcohoics or not. Booze is for play time, or for speeding through the long hours of a dull day.
The writing should be your passion, your raison d'etre, and comparing it to another passion might help this analogy along.
If you were out with a lady and it was a sure thing, how much would you have to drink? Enough to loosen up a bit, relax, and get out on the dance floor? Or so much that your dick went all floppy, you throw up on your shoes, and then piss yourself and cry as she takes pictures of you to post on the internet?
Thought so. Now put a cork in it and get to work!
Friday, November 13, 2009
Appocalypse Special! Ancient Secrets Revealed!
I do a lot of stupid shit. I'm bad with money. I drink too much. I mess around with Jim. I think the stupidest thing I do, however, is continue to obey superstitions.
To be fair, half of mine are completely innocuous (knocking on wood, saying "Gesundheit" after someone sneezes, etc) and the other half are a result of my OCD which I just call "lucky" (eg taking an even number of steps to cross the street, touching something with my left hand if I touch it with my right, etc). I don't honestly think the devil is going to give someone a wytchye pox of the fyve humours if I don't bless them after sneezing, nor do I actually think that somehow taking 20 steps instead of 21 to cross the lobby will get me a job or something.
Nobody really quite seems to know what "lucky" means, do they? I mean, if I rub a rabbit's foot and win the lotto, that seems like a pretty good corollary, but if I rub a rabbit's foot, get struck by a car, break every bone in my body, but survive, is it really quite the same when they say I'm "lucky to be alive?"
In any case, I did some digging on the nature of superstition. B.F. Skinner found that pigeons of all things display superstitious behavior - that pigeons in a box which happened to wobble their head back and forth before feeding would assume that it was the head-wobbling that got them fed, without noticing that the food was coming at regular timed intervals. Still, the pigeons would wobble their heads or turn counter-clockwise or what have you while the uncaring Skinner just doled out food every hour on the hour.
Sometimes the pigeons would notice that if they weren't fed when they wobbled their heads, they might be fed when they flapped their wings, so they would bob their heads and flap their wings. After a long enough time, they combined enough of these behaviors to form what might be called a sort of animalistic ritual of spinning, bobbing, and flapping. Before long, the pigeons spent all their time spinning, bobbing, and flapping, and there was much contention over which combination worked the best. Did they bob, spin and flap? Flap, bob, and spin? Each pigeon devised its own sort of wild energetic dance, each pigeon continued to be fed every hour, on the hour, but unable to conceptualize time they continued to believe that it was the ritual that brought them food, and not the calloused hands of BF skinner who, upon seeing his pigeons given over to apoplectic fits, wrung their necks and fed them to some poor orphan children whom he had also locked up in boxes for observation.
Just as the pigeons weren't really conjuring food by their happy little dances, neither does my blessing a person keep illness away, nor does crossing a street with an even number of steps keep me safe or happy.
But in all cases, there are these warm fuzzy occurrences of correlation, which do not necessarily (read, probably don't) imply causality. The fallacy of thinking otherwise is called "cum hoc ergo propter hoc," and once you get done giggling over the word "cum"...well no, that's not going to happen, so get it out of your system.
Right, okay, the fallacy means "with this, therefore because of this," and it is best exemplified by Lisa Simpson's description of her anti-tiger rock to Homer, in which she explains that a rock (which she picks up out of the yard) keeps man-eating tigers away. Homer asks if it really works, and she explains that she is holding the rock, and certainly doesn't see any tigers around, at which point Homer insists on buying the rock ...hilarity ensues.
But I know that, technically, when I kiss the dice before an important roll in D&D it doesn't do anything put put my cheeto-and-mountain-dew spit on the 20, and possibly spread my SARS to the next person to do so. When I knock on wood, it doesn't do anything more than make my knuckles sore.
One of the more common arguments I hear in defense of superstition is that it gives people comfort, or gives them a way of feeling that they have some control over things which they actually do not. Well big F'ing deal! I thought that's what we had Charles Swindoll for, to make you feel good about the fact that every day is a vertical climb up the windy west face of crap mountain, and wanting to have control over things does not give you that control. In other words, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster.
This is to a large degree why the whole 2012 thing irks me.
Nothing is going to happen in 2012. Okay, sure, I mean, we'll all still be alive and thus _something_ is going to happen, like you'll probably slip on a banana peel and fall face-first into a coconut cream pie while a nearby trombone goes Wah-wah-wah-waaaaahhhh, but the apocalypse is not coming. I promise everyone that with every fiber of my being, and I'm just so awfully sick of seeing anything saying otherwise. It's orientalism, plain and simple - the idea that mystic brown people have a deep connection with gaia earth mother that white people just don't get, or rather, white people who don't wear head scarves, buy hundreds of dollars worth of crystals, and hang dream catchers from the rear-view mirrors of their Prius's don't get.
But, people say, the I-Ching points to 2012, and the Mayan Calendar, and also the Freemason Illuminati Crop Circle Visitor Area 51 Art Bell! To which I can only mostly respond with completely dumb silence, but really ought to start pointing out that in 1999, I was paid a middle-class wage to go into an office for eight hours a day and install the Windows NT Y2K compliance pack so as to ward off the horrors of approaching digital Armageddon.
On the morning of January 1, 2000, life continued as normal: with a massive hangover and someone else's underwear in my mouth. Nothing happened, and it seems likely that a lot of our preparations were just so much voodoo. 2012 will pass just like 2000, and I will wake up on the morning of December 13, 2012 to make myself coffee and eat too much bacon for breakfast since, thankfully, that 13th does not fall on a Friday.
To be fair, half of mine are completely innocuous (knocking on wood, saying "Gesundheit" after someone sneezes, etc) and the other half are a result of my OCD which I just call "lucky" (eg taking an even number of steps to cross the street, touching something with my left hand if I touch it with my right, etc). I don't honestly think the devil is going to give someone a wytchye pox of the fyve humours if I don't bless them after sneezing, nor do I actually think that somehow taking 20 steps instead of 21 to cross the lobby will get me a job or something.
Nobody really quite seems to know what "lucky" means, do they? I mean, if I rub a rabbit's foot and win the lotto, that seems like a pretty good corollary, but if I rub a rabbit's foot, get struck by a car, break every bone in my body, but survive, is it really quite the same when they say I'm "lucky to be alive?"
In any case, I did some digging on the nature of superstition. B.F. Skinner found that pigeons of all things display superstitious behavior - that pigeons in a box which happened to wobble their head back and forth before feeding would assume that it was the head-wobbling that got them fed, without noticing that the food was coming at regular timed intervals. Still, the pigeons would wobble their heads or turn counter-clockwise or what have you while the uncaring Skinner just doled out food every hour on the hour.
Sometimes the pigeons would notice that if they weren't fed when they wobbled their heads, they might be fed when they flapped their wings, so they would bob their heads and flap their wings. After a long enough time, they combined enough of these behaviors to form what might be called a sort of animalistic ritual of spinning, bobbing, and flapping. Before long, the pigeons spent all their time spinning, bobbing, and flapping, and there was much contention over which combination worked the best. Did they bob, spin and flap? Flap, bob, and spin? Each pigeon devised its own sort of wild energetic dance, each pigeon continued to be fed every hour, on the hour, but unable to conceptualize time they continued to believe that it was the ritual that brought them food, and not the calloused hands of BF skinner who, upon seeing his pigeons given over to apoplectic fits, wrung their necks and fed them to some poor orphan children whom he had also locked up in boxes for observation.
Just as the pigeons weren't really conjuring food by their happy little dances, neither does my blessing a person keep illness away, nor does crossing a street with an even number of steps keep me safe or happy.
But in all cases, there are these warm fuzzy occurrences of correlation, which do not necessarily (read, probably don't) imply causality. The fallacy of thinking otherwise is called "cum hoc ergo propter hoc," and once you get done giggling over the word "cum"...well no, that's not going to happen, so get it out of your system.
Right, okay, the fallacy means "with this, therefore because of this," and it is best exemplified by Lisa Simpson's description of her anti-tiger rock to Homer, in which she explains that a rock (which she picks up out of the yard) keeps man-eating tigers away. Homer asks if it really works, and she explains that she is holding the rock, and certainly doesn't see any tigers around, at which point Homer insists on buying the rock ...hilarity ensues.
But I know that, technically, when I kiss the dice before an important roll in D&D it doesn't do anything put put my cheeto-and-mountain-dew spit on the 20, and possibly spread my SARS to the next person to do so. When I knock on wood, it doesn't do anything more than make my knuckles sore.
One of the more common arguments I hear in defense of superstition is that it gives people comfort, or gives them a way of feeling that they have some control over things which they actually do not. Well big F'ing deal! I thought that's what we had Charles Swindoll for, to make you feel good about the fact that every day is a vertical climb up the windy west face of crap mountain, and wanting to have control over things does not give you that control. In other words, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster.
This is to a large degree why the whole 2012 thing irks me.
Nothing is going to happen in 2012. Okay, sure, I mean, we'll all still be alive and thus _something_ is going to happen, like you'll probably slip on a banana peel and fall face-first into a coconut cream pie while a nearby trombone goes Wah-wah-wah-waaaaahhhh, but the apocalypse is not coming. I promise everyone that with every fiber of my being, and I'm just so awfully sick of seeing anything saying otherwise. It's orientalism, plain and simple - the idea that mystic brown people have a deep connection with gaia earth mother that white people just don't get, or rather, white people who don't wear head scarves, buy hundreds of dollars worth of crystals, and hang dream catchers from the rear-view mirrors of their Prius's don't get.
But, people say, the I-Ching points to 2012, and the Mayan Calendar, and also the Freemason Illuminati Crop Circle Visitor Area 51 Art Bell! To which I can only mostly respond with completely dumb silence, but really ought to start pointing out that in 1999, I was paid a middle-class wage to go into an office for eight hours a day and install the Windows NT Y2K compliance pack so as to ward off the horrors of approaching digital Armageddon.
On the morning of January 1, 2000, life continued as normal: with a massive hangover and someone else's underwear in my mouth. Nothing happened, and it seems likely that a lot of our preparations were just so much voodoo. 2012 will pass just like 2000, and I will wake up on the morning of December 13, 2012 to make myself coffee and eat too much bacon for breakfast since, thankfully, that 13th does not fall on a Friday.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Big Brother is Watching Poo – a Scatological Exploration of Diminishing Privacy
Let’s suppose you’re in the can at work, dropping a deuce. Not just any deuce, but the Queen Mary of bowl bricks. Titanic in dimension and ponderous in pace, you’re glad you brought your Blackberry into the john with you, because you’re gonna have to re-schedule that 2:00 meeting around this event and, you think, your subsequent hospitalization for ass-related tear trauma. You wish you had a match, and something more interesting than the free trial version of Bejewelled, but you’ve got a few minutes of privacy in the middle of your work day, and you’ll feel much, much better when all this is out of your system.
There are two other people in the bathroom. You see their shoes as they walk past your stall (you always sit in the one closest to the door, as it is statistically the cleanest), and you hear one open the farthest door from you, and the second opens the next over. Thinking nothing of it, you grab the handicapped rail on the side of the stall and brace yourself for another big push.
All the blood rushes to your head, and your face turns red – dear god, is this thing ever going to end? You’re thinking that this ethereal single-ply TP here at the office isn’t going to cut it when the time comes to grab a handful, so you don’t notice that the two people in the bathroom with you have been opening stall doors all the way down the row until they are now standing outside your little pepto-bismol pink painted sheet metal door. For a good time call Nancy, it says.
One of the two people tries the door, and you say “Occupado!”
In response, one of the people says something about being a member of the Workplace Health and Safety Office, and tells you that they need to see what’s going on in there.
“Um, I’m taking a shit,” you say, and then you try to settle back down into your little constitutional, but with a massive kick, the door flies back in towards you, just missing your bare knees.
One of the people grabs you and tells you that they are authorized under some act or code or statute to seize all contents of said cubicle, table, or stall, that you are not to interfere with this process, nor are you entitled to any motion of complaint or redress of grievance. You’re ordered to remove your clothing and stand at least two meters away from the inspection team.
In the meantime, the other person is poking around the toilet with a stick. “There’s a lot of crap in here – gonna be hard to sort out,” he says, and then produces a ladle and a plastic bag, into which he doles in what you just doled out.
You ask what all this is about, and the first person reminds you that you are not allowed to make any sort of inquiry into these proceedings. To reinforce the point, he brandishes a taser. As an aside, he says, “don’t worry – if you haven’t done anything wrong then there won’t be any trouble.”
Your boss comes in, accompanied by that real cutie from HR you’ve been flirting with. Neither of them makes eye contact with you. Your boss taps his foot impatiently and asks what the inspection team has found.
“Nothing yet – we’re gonna have to confiscate this apparatus and take it all back to the lab,” the second inspector says.
“Larry, what the hell is going on?” you ask your boss, trying to cover yourself up as the first inspector goes through your pockets, but your boss doesn’t acknowledge you, nor does the cutie from HR who is now marking a bag or your excrement with a sticker marked “biohazard.”
You are given a pair of orange coveralls and told to go back to your desk. You are not to leave your desk until the end of the day, at which time you will begin a two week suspension as your activities are investigated.
At your desk, your computer has been confiscated, as have all your paper files. Your phone is unplugged, and when you go to reconnect it you find an iron hasp over the jack. While you were gone, someone replaced your chair with one very much like it, but this one doesn’t recline.
Of course, that was probably just Linda from accounting being a complete bitch again.
You start your suspension. For two weeks you sit at home, doing not much of anything. Your phone and internet have been disconnected. The TV only shows Judge Judy re-runs.
When your suspension ends, you go back to work. Your computer is there, but it’s not your computer. Same with your phone – there are recording devices attached to each. You are given a five-page document from HR instructing you where and at what time you may use the restroom.
Your boss comes over to your desk.
“These things are routine, don’t feel bad. They didn’t find anything on your computer, or your phone, or in your stool. Like I always say – if you don’t do anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of, am I right?”
Your boss leaves. You turn on your computer – your wallpaper has been replaced with a corporate mascot. Most of your third-party apps and downloads are gone. You open up your desk drawer and find a crap-filled plastic bag, and attached to the bag is an orange sticker that marks your feces as “conforming,” and thanks you for your compliance.
There are two other people in the bathroom. You see their shoes as they walk past your stall (you always sit in the one closest to the door, as it is statistically the cleanest), and you hear one open the farthest door from you, and the second opens the next over. Thinking nothing of it, you grab the handicapped rail on the side of the stall and brace yourself for another big push.
All the blood rushes to your head, and your face turns red – dear god, is this thing ever going to end? You’re thinking that this ethereal single-ply TP here at the office isn’t going to cut it when the time comes to grab a handful, so you don’t notice that the two people in the bathroom with you have been opening stall doors all the way down the row until they are now standing outside your little pepto-bismol pink painted sheet metal door. For a good time call Nancy, it says.
One of the two people tries the door, and you say “Occupado!”
In response, one of the people says something about being a member of the Workplace Health and Safety Office, and tells you that they need to see what’s going on in there.
“Um, I’m taking a shit,” you say, and then you try to settle back down into your little constitutional, but with a massive kick, the door flies back in towards you, just missing your bare knees.
One of the people grabs you and tells you that they are authorized under some act or code or statute to seize all contents of said cubicle, table, or stall, that you are not to interfere with this process, nor are you entitled to any motion of complaint or redress of grievance. You’re ordered to remove your clothing and stand at least two meters away from the inspection team.
In the meantime, the other person is poking around the toilet with a stick. “There’s a lot of crap in here – gonna be hard to sort out,” he says, and then produces a ladle and a plastic bag, into which he doles in what you just doled out.
You ask what all this is about, and the first person reminds you that you are not allowed to make any sort of inquiry into these proceedings. To reinforce the point, he brandishes a taser. As an aside, he says, “don’t worry – if you haven’t done anything wrong then there won’t be any trouble.”
Your boss comes in, accompanied by that real cutie from HR you’ve been flirting with. Neither of them makes eye contact with you. Your boss taps his foot impatiently and asks what the inspection team has found.
“Nothing yet – we’re gonna have to confiscate this apparatus and take it all back to the lab,” the second inspector says.
“Larry, what the hell is going on?” you ask your boss, trying to cover yourself up as the first inspector goes through your pockets, but your boss doesn’t acknowledge you, nor does the cutie from HR who is now marking a bag or your excrement with a sticker marked “biohazard.”
You are given a pair of orange coveralls and told to go back to your desk. You are not to leave your desk until the end of the day, at which time you will begin a two week suspension as your activities are investigated.
At your desk, your computer has been confiscated, as have all your paper files. Your phone is unplugged, and when you go to reconnect it you find an iron hasp over the jack. While you were gone, someone replaced your chair with one very much like it, but this one doesn’t recline.
Of course, that was probably just Linda from accounting being a complete bitch again.
You start your suspension. For two weeks you sit at home, doing not much of anything. Your phone and internet have been disconnected. The TV only shows Judge Judy re-runs.
When your suspension ends, you go back to work. Your computer is there, but it’s not your computer. Same with your phone – there are recording devices attached to each. You are given a five-page document from HR instructing you where and at what time you may use the restroom.
Your boss comes over to your desk.
“These things are routine, don’t feel bad. They didn’t find anything on your computer, or your phone, or in your stool. Like I always say – if you don’t do anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of, am I right?”
Your boss leaves. You turn on your computer – your wallpaper has been replaced with a corporate mascot. Most of your third-party apps and downloads are gone. You open up your desk drawer and find a crap-filled plastic bag, and attached to the bag is an orange sticker that marks your feces as “conforming,” and thanks you for your compliance.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 5: I got 99 Problems, but your Journal’s Mission Statement Ain’t One.
At Metaphorward, we strive to publish accomplished writers with emerging new voices together in a way that encourages new talent to develop while also making sure to publish enough Joyce Carol Oates reprints to make sure that people actually buy our journal. This in turn allows us to buy staples, glue, dope, and a shared subscription to Writer's Market. We are committed to bringing great, exclusive fiction to the masses so long as the masses do not number beyond about one thousand, maybe fifteen hundred, and all have internet connections and are not put off by condescending language, obscure allusions, and elusive innuendo.
Read previous issues to get a feel for some of the things we like. We publish an eclectic array of fiction, poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction, but not so eclectic that you can just send us anything. We’re basically looking for one particular story, and if that story is yours then awesome. Of course, we will not just come out and say what we’re looking for, because we want you to really impress us - knock us off our feet!
We take our vision seriously. Our name is more than just a clever pun - Meta-forward. Meta, like, you know, meta, like stuff that is about itself, but also about other things, or like over stuff, or whatever. Forward, like progress, like as in progressive, so we can reject capitalism and go live in teepees, but also metaphor, but maybe not metaphor, since metaphors, like caused the holocaust or something? I kind of skipped workshop the day we talked about it, but that's what everyone was saying - that metaphors caused the holocaust and poetry was a metaphor, so every time you write a poem a Nazi gets his wings.
We want to see your best work, and only your best. We expect all entries to be well-written, edited, revised, re-written, proofread, and re-written again. We take the best because we are the best. Metaphorward is not able to pay contributors at this time.
GUIDELINES:
Poetry – Submit up to five poems, none longer than 100 lines, and none shorter than a single syllable. That single syllable can span up to 5 pages, and those 100 lines can be hand-written so as to fit on the head of a match. Don’t send us poems that rhyme, or that have rhythm, or that could possibly be read as coherent sentences.
Fiction – Submit up to three pieces of flash fiction, none longer than 500 words, or one story not to exceed 2000 words. Flash fiction should be obnoxiously twee and do something clever like end on a zingy one-liner, or have your characters be aware of their narrative situationality, or occurring in the second person. We do ask that you not submit any genre fiction, so no science fiction, fantasy, or horror since people actually read that stuff. We mostly want stories about people who are basically okay with their lives who have one or two little things happen to them, and then they figure out how to be okay with it – stuff like not realizing their dreams, or having to struggle with some facet of white upper middle class identity that makes them uncomfortable. We also like stories about brown people if there is rape, incest, or murder involved – you know, the kind of stuff that shows how gritty it is to be a brown person.
Creative Non Fiction – You have to be important and interesting before you can be the subject of creative non-fiction. Just because you lost your virginity to your cousin doesn’t mean you’re interesting. If you lost your virginity to your cousin at the battle of Agincourt, then you have a story.
Essays – Metaphorward is always accepting essays on a broad range of topics including art, fashion, trends in fiction, Sociology 232, Asian Studies 316, and Econ 101.
Photography - Please send your picture of a poor black man on a Mississippi stoop, a beer can on a train track, rusting playground equipment, flowers in the rain, an abandoned car on the road side, or an overturned wheelbarrow to our photography editor.
We take our commitment to new talent seriously – so seriously that we arbitrarily pick ten stories at random every month, give them a cursory proofreading to make sure they’re not actually psycho Nazi hate lit or an advertisement for Canadian Cialis, and then we have undergraduate interns slap these slush submissions somewhere in the back, after the photographs, and before the advertisements for Canadian Cialis.
Don't be afraid to send us new, experimental fiction so long as it's easily comparable to something else, like Hemingway in space - well no, we already said no genre fiction, so Hemingway if Hemingway lived in Manhattan and worked for an ad agency and drove a hatchback. Or if Hemingway was a self-absorbed anorexic who wore girls jeans and wrote Power Puff Girls slash fiction. But don't send us the slash fiction, send us Hemingway. But, like, experimental Hemingway. But experimental Hemingway for now, but for then. Dear god, where oh where is Hemingway when we need him?
Our responses take about 2-6 months to process, so please be patient. If you haven't heard from us in six months, we've already graduated and left the journal to our now-undergraduate interns, so it's their problem and not mine. Realistically, we've got a backlog of about two hundred people we owe favors to, so the only way we're printing you is if you give us money or our professors tell us to.
Best of luck,
Vytautas Malesh
Editor-in-Chief
Metaphorward - the College University College of Arts and Letters' Literary Journal
Read previous issues to get a feel for some of the things we like. We publish an eclectic array of fiction, poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction, but not so eclectic that you can just send us anything. We’re basically looking for one particular story, and if that story is yours then awesome. Of course, we will not just come out and say what we’re looking for, because we want you to really impress us - knock us off our feet!
We take our vision seriously. Our name is more than just a clever pun - Meta-forward. Meta, like, you know, meta, like stuff that is about itself, but also about other things, or like over stuff, or whatever. Forward, like progress, like as in progressive, so we can reject capitalism and go live in teepees, but also metaphor, but maybe not metaphor, since metaphors, like caused the holocaust or something? I kind of skipped workshop the day we talked about it, but that's what everyone was saying - that metaphors caused the holocaust and poetry was a metaphor, so every time you write a poem a Nazi gets his wings.
We want to see your best work, and only your best. We expect all entries to be well-written, edited, revised, re-written, proofread, and re-written again. We take the best because we are the best. Metaphorward is not able to pay contributors at this time.
GUIDELINES:
Poetry – Submit up to five poems, none longer than 100 lines, and none shorter than a single syllable. That single syllable can span up to 5 pages, and those 100 lines can be hand-written so as to fit on the head of a match. Don’t send us poems that rhyme, or that have rhythm, or that could possibly be read as coherent sentences.
Fiction – Submit up to three pieces of flash fiction, none longer than 500 words, or one story not to exceed 2000 words. Flash fiction should be obnoxiously twee and do something clever like end on a zingy one-liner, or have your characters be aware of their narrative situationality, or occurring in the second person. We do ask that you not submit any genre fiction, so no science fiction, fantasy, or horror since people actually read that stuff. We mostly want stories about people who are basically okay with their lives who have one or two little things happen to them, and then they figure out how to be okay with it – stuff like not realizing their dreams, or having to struggle with some facet of white upper middle class identity that makes them uncomfortable. We also like stories about brown people if there is rape, incest, or murder involved – you know, the kind of stuff that shows how gritty it is to be a brown person.
Creative Non Fiction – You have to be important and interesting before you can be the subject of creative non-fiction. Just because you lost your virginity to your cousin doesn’t mean you’re interesting. If you lost your virginity to your cousin at the battle of Agincourt, then you have a story.
Essays – Metaphorward is always accepting essays on a broad range of topics including art, fashion, trends in fiction, Sociology 232, Asian Studies 316, and Econ 101.
Photography - Please send your picture of a poor black man on a Mississippi stoop, a beer can on a train track, rusting playground equipment, flowers in the rain, an abandoned car on the road side, or an overturned wheelbarrow to our photography editor.
We take our commitment to new talent seriously – so seriously that we arbitrarily pick ten stories at random every month, give them a cursory proofreading to make sure they’re not actually psycho Nazi hate lit or an advertisement for Canadian Cialis, and then we have undergraduate interns slap these slush submissions somewhere in the back, after the photographs, and before the advertisements for Canadian Cialis.
Don't be afraid to send us new, experimental fiction so long as it's easily comparable to something else, like Hemingway in space - well no, we already said no genre fiction, so Hemingway if Hemingway lived in Manhattan and worked for an ad agency and drove a hatchback. Or if Hemingway was a self-absorbed anorexic who wore girls jeans and wrote Power Puff Girls slash fiction. But don't send us the slash fiction, send us Hemingway. But, like, experimental Hemingway. But experimental Hemingway for now, but for then. Dear god, where oh where is Hemingway when we need him?
Our responses take about 2-6 months to process, so please be patient. If you haven't heard from us in six months, we've already graduated and left the journal to our now-undergraduate interns, so it's their problem and not mine. Realistically, we've got a backlog of about two hundred people we owe favors to, so the only way we're printing you is if you give us money or our professors tell us to.
Best of luck,
Vytautas Malesh
Editor-in-Chief
Metaphorward - the College University College of Arts and Letters' Literary Journal
Friday, November 6, 2009
Read My Story!
First things first: read my short story Hands on Danse Macabre!
I had composed a relatively compact entry on the nature of privacy and its importance to a free society. However, before I could put in all those crafty hotlinks I love so well, I got an email confirming that my short story Hands had been posted to Danse Macabre literary e-zine.
Rather than suggest that anyone read two large chunks of my text in the middle of their workday, I will simply request that all you who regularly read this blog please bop on over to DM and have a look. Hopefully, the nice editorial staff there went through the trouble of correcting my grammar and spelling, but if not, just consider any mistakes to be "chase" defects that make the story more collectible.
Having said all this, I still want to make a footnote here regarding the secret ACTA negotiations, in which the US is taking part. It is broad in scope and unabashed in its preference of large corporate interests, and in so being is a fine example of someone, somewhere, deciding that you've just got too much damned liberty, and need to be monitored for your own good. If reading big huge pieces of international copyright treaties isn't your bag, baby, skip ahead to the criticisms on the wiki article, or read the ongoing commentary by Michael Geist.
Sorry, not a funny post. Here's my hero, doing what he does best.
I had composed a relatively compact entry on the nature of privacy and its importance to a free society. However, before I could put in all those crafty hotlinks I love so well, I got an email confirming that my short story Hands had been posted to Danse Macabre literary e-zine.
Rather than suggest that anyone read two large chunks of my text in the middle of their workday, I will simply request that all you who regularly read this blog please bop on over to DM and have a look. Hopefully, the nice editorial staff there went through the trouble of correcting my grammar and spelling, but if not, just consider any mistakes to be "chase" defects that make the story more collectible.
Having said all this, I still want to make a footnote here regarding the secret ACTA negotiations, in which the US is taking part. It is broad in scope and unabashed in its preference of large corporate interests, and in so being is a fine example of someone, somewhere, deciding that you've just got too much damned liberty, and need to be monitored for your own good. If reading big huge pieces of international copyright treaties isn't your bag, baby, skip ahead to the criticisms on the wiki article, or read the ongoing commentary by Michael Geist.
Sorry, not a funny post. Here's my hero, doing what he does best.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Selling Out or Buying In? Good Jobs for Writers Based Pretty Much Just on My Experience
It’s funny to look back at one of the earliest posts in this blog, and also my bio, and see that I proudly wear that whole “over-educated pizza cook” thing on my sleeve because not two months after going ahead and committing to a monastic life of poverty, prose, and pizza, I’ve won gainful employment. I will be proofreading, editing, and eventually writing textbooks for a Detroit-based e-learning company. Yes, it is a “jobby-job,” the very kind I’d essentially given up on.
This got me thinking: what are the best jobs for a writer to have? Since I’ve been working since the age of 11, this seems like something on which I should have some expertise, and also writing about it keeps the voices in my head from chanting “Sell-out! Sell-out! Sell-out!”
Of all the jobs I’ve had in the last 21 years of on-and-off employment, I’ll rate the top and bottom three for your consideration, starting with the best.
Number 3: Cook
Big surprise, the author of a blog sub-titled “The Pizzaland Diaries” suggests that restaurant work is good for writers – but with good reason. Unless you work for the world’s biggest douche, you get at least one free meal out of it every day. The pay is terrible even when the counter people or wait staff tip you out, but the work is mostly mindless reflex, and very little of your job stress will ever follow you home, leaving you well-fed and ready to write.
Number 2: Clerk
Yes, like that hilarious movie. As a clerk, you get an endless parade of customers from all walks of life – the rich, the poor, the smart, the dumb, all coming into your store for whatever you’ve got. The pay is crap, but like cooking, it’s very low stress. If you want to work your way up to shift manager then the money is better, you start getting benefits, and it’s only about 2% harder than ringing up customers. I was a video store clerk for about two years, and much of my opinion regarding civility and society was formed during that time on account of the diverse population I encountered.
Number 2: Night Watchman
Back in Lansing, I guarded the Water and Light building as it was being renovated. I had the whole place to myself for eight hours, during which I was free to write, draw, read, study, unscrew the salt shakers in the cafeteria, super-glue people’s desk drawers shut, and steal office supplies. Admittedly, all that time off will make you stir-crazy, and the job itself is horribly boring, but isn’t your keen intellect and fiery imagination what drew you to writing in the first place? The pay is actually better than what you’d get for cooking, but no free food unless you find the key to the vending machine, which you will, so…hope you like Watchamacallits.
Number 3: Hard Labor
I’ve de-tasseled corn, shoveled shit, and laid bricks, all of which left me completely exhausted and ravenously hungry. Well, maybe not so much the shit-shovelling. These were good character-building experiences, but as a writer “character” ranks pretty low on the list of things you’re supposed to have. Any job that really busts your hump is going to wring you out and leave you vapid and senseless. It’s good for a short-term thing if, like me, you have an “unproductive season” wherein you find it harder to write and could use a few months away from the keyboard, but on the whole you’re better served saving your strength.
Number 2: Service
Clerking is one thing, but being responsible for disseminating product knowledge and supporting procedures is another. I’m pulling from my experience as a help desk technician which, while lucrative, was a disproportionate drain on my mental resources. After a day of explaining the difference between double and single clicking, that turning off the monitor does not constitute a reboot, and that for the hundredth time, no, I do not know Bill Gates, you’re pretty much ready for Miller time. Story? Schmory. I’m taking all this money I’m making and getting high.
Number 1: Teaching
Of all the jobs I’ve held, teaching made me the least productive. I fear for my own output as I foray into editing, but mostly I think I’ll be fine since this is already good quality stuff coming down the pipe, as opposed to freshman-year drivel. Writers always get “contaminated” by what they’re reading, and if you’re reading fifty sub-literate freshman papers on the topic of “society today,” you’re going to start writing like a sub-literate freshman. Teaching pays well, and the work is easy, but I found that my work suffered from the company I kept. Additionally, any writing-related industry will pull you into a recursive loop of reading about writing, writing about writing, and so on into reductive infinity. Do something else!
As I foray back into the world of grown-up work, I’m reminded of the advice of my friend and mentor, Chris Leland. To paraphrase, he warned us to avoid the seduction of the starving artist’s lifestyle: the efficiency apartment, one change of clothes, a can of beans on a hotplate, and so on. Writing is work, and you have to keep your strength up for it. Eat well, drink often, and sleep soundly. Live in the world! Don’t deprive yourself of basic necessities and comforts out of some misplaced sense of integrity – integrity comes from within, and is nourished by that which comes from without.
This got me thinking: what are the best jobs for a writer to have? Since I’ve been working since the age of 11, this seems like something on which I should have some expertise, and also writing about it keeps the voices in my head from chanting “Sell-out! Sell-out! Sell-out!”
Of all the jobs I’ve had in the last 21 years of on-and-off employment, I’ll rate the top and bottom three for your consideration, starting with the best.
Top 3 Writer Jobs.
Number 3: Cook
Big surprise, the author of a blog sub-titled “The Pizzaland Diaries” suggests that restaurant work is good for writers – but with good reason. Unless you work for the world’s biggest douche, you get at least one free meal out of it every day. The pay is terrible even when the counter people or wait staff tip you out, but the work is mostly mindless reflex, and very little of your job stress will ever follow you home, leaving you well-fed and ready to write.
Number 2: Clerk
Yes, like that hilarious movie. As a clerk, you get an endless parade of customers from all walks of life – the rich, the poor, the smart, the dumb, all coming into your store for whatever you’ve got. The pay is crap, but like cooking, it’s very low stress. If you want to work your way up to shift manager then the money is better, you start getting benefits, and it’s only about 2% harder than ringing up customers. I was a video store clerk for about two years, and much of my opinion regarding civility and society was formed during that time on account of the diverse population I encountered.
Number 2: Night Watchman
Back in Lansing, I guarded the Water and Light building as it was being renovated. I had the whole place to myself for eight hours, during which I was free to write, draw, read, study, unscrew the salt shakers in the cafeteria, super-glue people’s desk drawers shut, and steal office supplies. Admittedly, all that time off will make you stir-crazy, and the job itself is horribly boring, but isn’t your keen intellect and fiery imagination what drew you to writing in the first place? The pay is actually better than what you’d get for cooking, but no free food unless you find the key to the vending machine, which you will, so…hope you like Watchamacallits.
The Worst
Number 3: Hard Labor
I’ve de-tasseled corn, shoveled shit, and laid bricks, all of which left me completely exhausted and ravenously hungry. Well, maybe not so much the shit-shovelling. These were good character-building experiences, but as a writer “character” ranks pretty low on the list of things you’re supposed to have. Any job that really busts your hump is going to wring you out and leave you vapid and senseless. It’s good for a short-term thing if, like me, you have an “unproductive season” wherein you find it harder to write and could use a few months away from the keyboard, but on the whole you’re better served saving your strength.
Number 2: Service
Clerking is one thing, but being responsible for disseminating product knowledge and supporting procedures is another. I’m pulling from my experience as a help desk technician which, while lucrative, was a disproportionate drain on my mental resources. After a day of explaining the difference between double and single clicking, that turning off the monitor does not constitute a reboot, and that for the hundredth time, no, I do not know Bill Gates, you’re pretty much ready for Miller time. Story? Schmory. I’m taking all this money I’m making and getting high.
Number 1: Teaching
Of all the jobs I’ve held, teaching made me the least productive. I fear for my own output as I foray into editing, but mostly I think I’ll be fine since this is already good quality stuff coming down the pipe, as opposed to freshman-year drivel. Writers always get “contaminated” by what they’re reading, and if you’re reading fifty sub-literate freshman papers on the topic of “society today,” you’re going to start writing like a sub-literate freshman. Teaching pays well, and the work is easy, but I found that my work suffered from the company I kept. Additionally, any writing-related industry will pull you into a recursive loop of reading about writing, writing about writing, and so on into reductive infinity. Do something else!
As I foray back into the world of grown-up work, I’m reminded of the advice of my friend and mentor, Chris Leland. To paraphrase, he warned us to avoid the seduction of the starving artist’s lifestyle: the efficiency apartment, one change of clothes, a can of beans on a hotplate, and so on. Writing is work, and you have to keep your strength up for it. Eat well, drink often, and sleep soundly. Live in the world! Don’t deprive yourself of basic necessities and comforts out of some misplaced sense of integrity – integrity comes from within, and is nourished by that which comes from without.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
LATE LATE LATE
SSS for 11-4-09 will be late on account of me going ahead and just getting plastered.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give it, Volume 4 : Poetry, Publishing's Get-Rich-Quick Scam
My second grade teacher Mrs. Schumacher (a woman old enough to have wet-nursed the kaiser and strict enough to have babysat Hitler) told us after a creative writing exercise that there were people that did nothing more for work than sit around and write stories, and it was at that point that I was 100% sure I wanted to be a writer. I wrote well, read voraciously, and figured that that one talent would be my ticket to easy street.
Mrs. Schumacher was evidently cribbing from an old issue of Vanity Fair which proudly announced it's acquisition of first refusal rights for one F. Scott Fitzgerald to the lindy-hopping tune of eighty bajillion Fox Trots per boot-legging story. Twenty-four years later, I've made more money taking bottles back than I have by word craft. If I hadn't proven to be Too Hot for AdSense, that deficit might have narrowed, but as-is I owe more of my Rubenesque physique to Michigan's generous 10-cent bottle back deposit program than to my ability to type 100 words per minute.
Which brings us to the point of this post. Someone has to tell you and so it might as well be me:
publishing is an industry, and writing is a passion.You're not going to make any money doing this.
Like any hobby, you have to do it because you love it for its own sake and not for some reward, be that praise, money, or what have you. You've got to write because it scratches that itch that nothing else can reach. If you're writing for the money, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.
To prove the point, quick: name five rich living authors. Yes, Ray Bradbury is still alive. Okay, now name five more. Then do it again. It's a bit harder at fifteen, right? Now name twenty-five rich movie stars. Then name twenty-five rich musicians. Finally, name twenty-five people you know personally who are doing okay for themselves, and ask yourself how many of them are writers.
What we're dealing with here is supply and demand. EVERYONE thinks they can write. I hear this all the time: My life would make SUCH a good book! or You know what? I should totally write a book some day - it would be a best seller! all of which may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that absolutely everyone thinks they can write. Of that 100%, something like 60% will actually try a little prose or verse. Of that 60%, maybe half will start a book. Of that 60%, less than 1% will actually finish it. Of that 1%, maybe 10% will seek publication.
Ignoring the source of those numbers for now, and assuming that we're talking about the population of America, that means that there are at any given time there are 90,000 books floating around the intellectual aether seeking publication. That's a whole hell of a lot, and while it's not more books than there are available venues for publication, it's a lot more books than there are profitable publishers looking to broker you a good deal (most publishers are pumping their "good deal" money into an ongoing but as of yet unsuccessful attempt to breed Dean Koontz with Sue Grafton to make the ultimate sub-literate printed cash-cow).
Meanwhile, as everyone is trying their hand at writing, NOBODY is reading. We're getting a few big popular books every year, but most prose and poetry falls under the radar in print runs in the low thousands. Even with a generous dollar-a-copy royalty, that's not a living wage, not considering the work, time, blood, sweat, and purple drank that goes into it.
So what's a writer to do? Learn a trade. No, not writing. One might write their way into publishing, and an accomplished writer might, say, teach, but it's best to learn some sort of skill: first, to pay for the necessities, and second because it provides near endless fodder for written material. Few things are more boring than writing about writers, so be more than a writer. We are not our jobs, but we all have them, and yours can be the link that ties you to your audience, either through your own downtrodden working-class sympathy or by sharing your world with your readers, a world they've never seen.
Mrs. Schumacher was evidently cribbing from an old issue of Vanity Fair which proudly announced it's acquisition of first refusal rights for one F. Scott Fitzgerald to the lindy-hopping tune of eighty bajillion Fox Trots per boot-legging story. Twenty-four years later, I've made more money taking bottles back than I have by word craft. If I hadn't proven to be Too Hot for AdSense, that deficit might have narrowed, but as-is I owe more of my Rubenesque physique to Michigan's generous 10-cent bottle back deposit program than to my ability to type 100 words per minute.
Which brings us to the point of this post. Someone has to tell you and so it might as well be me:
publishing is an industry, and writing is a passion.You're not going to make any money doing this.
Like any hobby, you have to do it because you love it for its own sake and not for some reward, be that praise, money, or what have you. You've got to write because it scratches that itch that nothing else can reach. If you're writing for the money, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.
To prove the point, quick: name five rich living authors. Yes, Ray Bradbury is still alive. Okay, now name five more. Then do it again. It's a bit harder at fifteen, right? Now name twenty-five rich movie stars. Then name twenty-five rich musicians. Finally, name twenty-five people you know personally who are doing okay for themselves, and ask yourself how many of them are writers.
What we're dealing with here is supply and demand. EVERYONE thinks they can write. I hear this all the time: My life would make SUCH a good book! or You know what? I should totally write a book some day - it would be a best seller! all of which may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that absolutely everyone thinks they can write. Of that 100%, something like 60% will actually try a little prose or verse. Of that 60%, maybe half will start a book. Of that 60%, less than 1% will actually finish it. Of that 1%, maybe 10% will seek publication.
Ignoring the source of those numbers for now, and assuming that we're talking about the population of America, that means that there are at any given time there are 90,000 books floating around the intellectual aether seeking publication. That's a whole hell of a lot, and while it's not more books than there are available venues for publication, it's a lot more books than there are profitable publishers looking to broker you a good deal (most publishers are pumping their "good deal" money into an ongoing but as of yet unsuccessful attempt to breed Dean Koontz with Sue Grafton to make the ultimate sub-literate printed cash-cow).
Meanwhile, as everyone is trying their hand at writing, NOBODY is reading. We're getting a few big popular books every year, but most prose and poetry falls under the radar in print runs in the low thousands. Even with a generous dollar-a-copy royalty, that's not a living wage, not considering the work, time, blood, sweat, and purple drank that goes into it.
So what's a writer to do? Learn a trade. No, not writing. One might write their way into publishing, and an accomplished writer might, say, teach, but it's best to learn some sort of skill: first, to pay for the necessities, and second because it provides near endless fodder for written material. Few things are more boring than writing about writers, so be more than a writer. We are not our jobs, but we all have them, and yours can be the link that ties you to your audience, either through your own downtrodden working-class sympathy or by sharing your world with your readers, a world they've never seen.
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