I’m putting this all under a cut, because it’s supposed to be a nice holiday today for people.
This is not a nice post.
This, in fact, is something of a recollection of very misguided patriotism.
… I’m reminded that some authors will get insanely angry if you go with three rather than five stars.
Amazing.
And then I just go back to reviewing like I did before, except I’m probably going to be ignoring a tiny, tiny subset of books published in SF/F.1 This is quite useful, for there are many books and so little time.
I get this impression from people not in my industry that they think we get paid well automatically.
It’s… kind of not true.
So I decided to share my experiences (some of them fortunately vicarious, others less so) about the tech industry in relation to this whole “assuming you’re getting paid” business, in the hopes that if it’s apparent that in one of the most well-paying industries in the world, assumptions are unwise, that it’ll be easier to see how it applies to writing, which is nowhere near as well-paying.
That’s all. I think I’m done for the day.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been keeping tabs on pragmatic Writing for Money articles on le web, and these are the must-reads I’ve come up with.
Of course, I always go for the snark.
Three from Nick Mamatas:
Freelance Writing Money, Part I: How To Find Freelance Writing Work:
Look for it.
In 2005, for the Prattshaw project Flytrap, I wrote an essay about freelance writing and suggested that if you could not make a living as a freelancer it is because your standards were too high, both for what counted as writing and what counted as a living. A couple of years later, a new science fiction writer (he’d debuted in Baen’s Universe) wrote me a letter of thanks. He happened to be reading the little zine in a hospital hallway while on the other side of the wall his wife was giving birth. At that moment, he decided to get together a few pieces of writing he’d completed in the hope of getting out of the job he had in a warehouse. He wrote to say that he credited my article with his new gig writing computer software manuals, which meant more money for his family.
Freelance Writing Money, Part II: Writing For Non-Publication:
Be the writer in your social circle.
If you spend a lot of time hanging out with other writers, going to your little writer’s group, and not talking to anyone who isn’t fascinated with writing, writing, writing, you can stop reading now. Sucker.
Remember that our goal here is fast money for writing, not a living doing technical, business, or commercial writing, which is great and pays a lot (I have friends who bill $85-$125 an hour for pamphlets and such) because it just takes a long time to break in. And speaking of suckers, people have degrees in this dumb crap sometimes these days. Though, like a lot of computing gigs, business writing is one of the highly paid jobs that one can snag without a degree.
And, of course, Freelance Writing Money, Part III OR Shocklines Post of the Day!, which is probably one of the better examples of “ads” you should avoid.
Here’s a recent post from John Scalzi’s Whatever:
Dear Writers: For God’s Sake, Don’t Assume You’ll Get Paid:
An interesting and frankly alarming thing in the comment thread of the last post. I noted in the last post that a major issue I saw with the proposed F&SF online writing workshop, which offers the chance that work in the workshop could get published in the magazine, is that there was no indication that those chosen stories would then be paid for. To which several people in the comment thread said something along the lines of “oh, well, that wasn’t a problem for me, because I just assumed there would be payment.”
Jesus, people.
Never assume as a writer that you’re going to get paid.
And now for something not quite completely different: the Washington Post recent scandal about WaPo canceling their plan to get funding from, um, lobbyists.
Addendum:
From Mark Tisdale’s comment on the Whatever thread, here’s a YouTube clip from Dreams with Sharp Teeth, wherein Harlan Ellison talking about getting paid:
Addendum 2:
For people looking for much linked coverage of the WaPo scandal, Politics Daily has the scoop.
A mysterious girl in the royal extended family, some say a demon because of disturbing markings around her eyes, is banished from the palace. A very young prince discovers her living in the gardens on the kindness of servants.
Like all princes, even ones that don’t reach the waist of their eldest sister, he wants to save her. But the only way to remove the demon’s markings from her eyes is for her to tell, bit by bit, the stories written upon them.
Thus begins The Orphan’s Tales, a well-woven tapestry of fairytales-within-fairytales in the world of Ajanabh, both like and unlike its inspiration, The Arabian Nights.
DVD extra #13, “Limits”, has been added at the official Shadow Unit site and also to the unofficial (but approved) bootleg Season 2 Extras ebook files!
Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-13 (Kindle/Mobipocket) (147.6 KiB, 167 hits)
Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-13 (EPub) (350.9 KiB, 86 hits)
Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-13 (Sony Reader) (229.9 KiB, 77 hits)
Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-13 (Microsoft Reader) (350.3 KiB, 71 hits)
Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-13 (PDF) (168.6 KiB, 92 hits)
It’s the end of the world like you’ve never known it: snarky and sassy with strangely touching moments weaved into a quick-moving story, Greg van Eekhout’s Norse Code manages to turn a fresh edge on old myths. And it’s probably the only re-weaving of Ragnarok where the poor blind guy, the one who started the countdown to Doomsday, is actually a sympathetic and participatory character rather than a footnote in lore.
Woke up early for just about no reason at all. Perhaps not that strange, since I spent a lot of nightmare recovery time over the weekend sleeping. Maybe it’s because the sun is out too early in the Pacific Northwest these days. But waking early has not been my modus operendi for weeks.
I still have the inopportune thoughts of course—my memories of my father screaming at me that he wished I had never been born, one of the rather numerous times at that, are about as common as, perhaps, more normal people remembering some encouraging moment or saying, maybe funny, from their dad.
It’s just that the memories don’t stop me like they did the week before and some days after Father’s Day. I really must start scheduling vacation time during this time in the future, since I’m not effective at work at times like these. To say the least. Usually I can just move past them. Usually.
Part of my brain wants to seriously snark at the other parts, “Oh, so you thought that something like Father’s Day wasn’t going to mess you up at all.”
The truth is… I really didn’t think it would. Even after years of this. I may well forget again next year; maybe I ought to set up a recurring reminder in my iPhone calendar….
Oh well.
It’s another week (or, rather, another half-month, if I count the days I’m going to have to redo work from). And… now I need to prepare for a big meeting. Joy. I like my job much better when I just code. At least you don’t get humiliated after a week like this.
At least it’s tomorrow. So it’ll probably be a good day.
I hope you have a good day, too.
