Spontaneous ∂erivation

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

I do not snark. This is snark: Rachel Toor in Writing Like a Doctor:

I started to read his manuscripts, and then made a few simple questions and comments: “Were you raised by wolves?” “How did you manage to graduate from such fancy-pants schools if you can’t even write a sentence?” “Do you know what a sentence is?”

And yes, that was with the critiquee in the driver’s seat. I think I love her.

And it’s a good article.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish.

In a previous post I stated that the only writing book I pay attention to is John Scalzi’s You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop.

Which is not the whole truth. The truth is that before my reductionism came some books that laid the land for specific terrain relevant to writing. Like lots of other writers, I’ve read a number of books on the topic. I’ve found that my tastes, and the most useful books to me, were by very pragmatic writers. The kind of writers who are really serious about making money from writing—but not gimmicky books. If it was pragmatic craft, it made the list.

So this is a pragmatic list. Some books not listed here that you possibly should read, such as Donald Maas’ Writing the Breakout Novel, I would highly recommend.

But after you get the basics, as it were.

1. The Victorians apparently hated the idea of leaving plain space on the walls. Even Sherlock Holmes, reportedly, who filled his walls with pictures of criminals, although most Victorians preferred more refined, but no less numerous, mounted clutter. [↩]
2. The second bar is, naturally, much higher, to the point where there are few, if any books that will help you get there. Some complain that there’s nothing but beginner writing books on craft out there, which is not exactly how I’d classify all of either Zinsser or Swain, but anyways: there’s a reason for that. [↩]

Someone asked me recently what kind of fiction I like to write, since I’ve written a tad (well, scrolls and scrolls where you all don’t see).

So I thought about linking to my fiction blog.

But then I realized I shut down my fiction blog due to lack of activity and general stupidity.

So I moved some bits of actual fiction that aren’t under heavy rewriting, under the F∂ link up at top.

These days the only writing book I pay much attention to is this one.

At some point I’m going to go through this site with a flamethrower and torch every single fiction writing advice article I have.

Actually, I think I’ll go do that now.

Over at Jeremiah Tolbert’s blog, I made a rather inept comment on his recent post about how spending too much time revising short fiction can cut your time/benefit ratio. Especially in terms of making money from writing.

I said that fiction (as in all of it) shouldn’t be depended upon for making money, and that marketing copy and non-fiction do it much better.

Well, marketing copy and non-fiction very often do do it much better. But as Nick Mamatas points out, selling short fiction to decent markets can also cover the bills—though he also points out that novels are perhaps not the best ROI, strictly speaking, if we’re going to be concerned about keystroke time versus money.

So, don’t short-change short fiction. And be smart about your markets. (After all, there are quite a lot of non-fiction markets that don’t pay very well, including most blogging positions.¹)

1. Note: Tor.com pays well. [↩]

Things I have learned from my thus far brief stint as a reviewer for Tor.com:

Negative reviewers: likely to remain negative, no matter how many times you tell them they’re a parasite and should remember their manners.

Other reviewers: likely to be turned off by your description of them as parasites, either because they already remember their manners and/or they’re expending a lot of effort on writing reviews in the first place, so the metaphor is doubly insulting. (And if you’re a writer or editor, you already knew both meanings and the etymology for “parasite”.¹ )

“Fair and Balanced” review: tends to elicit a reaction of meh. Doesn’t matter if it’s a positive or negative review.

Review from the heart: tends to generate interest. Doesn’t matter if it’s a positive or negative review.

Just like books, reviews can be sloppily written and poorly thought out. But just like books, reviews can be well written and require some amount of effort to be so (though obviously less effort than a book, nevertheless a reviewer that wants to eat enough for the month needs to review a LOT of books).

I would never think of telling Roger Ebert that he need never write a negative review. Why would you think of asking genre reviewers that?

We’re not here to golf-clap for you, because that really would be insulting. We are here to read you, think about your writings, and write about them, in a very meta kind of way. Although perhaps we shouldn’t bother to read you anymore (and that saves us both time).

Anyways, one reviewer doesn’t matter. Two don’t matter. Even many Amazon reviews don’t really matter. To slam every other reviewer is perhaps a nice feeling, but in general I don’t think it’s productive to draw trends from small sample sizes.

Of course, when a whole slew of reviewers across the board don’t like you (or, worse, are thunderously silent), you have other problems.

That’s all I have to say on the matter.

1. Hell, I know it, and I’m stupid. [↩]

Just finished Tobias Buckell’s spectacular anthology, Tides from the New Worlds, and I’m very impressed. I’ll be reviewing it for Tor.com soon.

But, like all good books, I’m taking a breather before I review, so that the themes and ideas provoked can percolate for a bit. This is true even for movies. This is true even for explody summer action movies. I think a lot when confronted with just about any kind of narrative.

Anthologies are the hardest to coalesce thoughts over, even when they’re just single author collections.

Sometimes I’m concerned about moving to the next work in my schedule, as if I’ll forget everything about whatever I just finished. But I’ve discovered that intervening time and works almost make no difference, even over months. I don’t need freshness—I need aging, like wine. Or cheese. (Although there’s a limit. I can’t imagine going for a year without hitting whatever expiration date is in my head.)

I will say, before the review comes out, that the last story in Tides from the New Worlds made me cry, but in a good way.

From the Chico Writer’s Group: original source in RTF.

After much regular expression and ruby scripting fun, I present to you an HTML version, complete with hyperlinks, and in order from oldest to newest. It’s very, very long, so I zipped up the file.

  #QueryFail March 2009 [ZIP] (70.1 KiB, 624 hits)

ETA: And now in other formats!
ETA #2: Corrected PDF link.

  #QueryFail March 2009 [Epub] (107.4 KiB, 153 hits)
  #QueryFail March 2009 [Kindle/Mobipocket] (207.0 KiB, 105 hits)
  #QueryFail March 2009 [Sony Reader] (639.3 KiB, 88 hits)
  #QueryFail March 2009 [Microsoft Reader] (112.4 KiB, 100 hits)
  #QueryFail March 2009 [PDF] (899.6 KiB, 1,126 hits)

Have fun!

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