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21 Jun 2009, blogFreelance writing mills are ubiquitous online: generally, they demand that you devote hours of your time building your reputation and profile on what is essentially an eBay for tedious, lifeless copywriting. The rewards are minor. While Dan Baum gripes on Twitter about being paid $90,000 a year to write for the New Yorker, writers on the other end of the pay scale are doing it for pennies—or worse—a percentage of potential AdSense revenue.
It’s seductive to anyone who writes for cash money in what may be the worst economic and cultural climate to do so since the Dark Ages (at least for the majority of writers not on the Conde Nast gravy train). With my bank account is often teetering precariously above overdraft gulch, I completely understand the argument for earning a few bucks in PayPal tender by slamming out a how-to-pimp-your-Firefox tutorial.
Bloody Mary Mornings, and Time to Write
15 Jun 2009, blog, travelMy old band Mule Train did a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning”, a song about a lovelorn Willie managing a cross-country flight from LAX with a stiff plastic cup of vodka and spicy tomato juice. It’s a great song:
Bloody Mary Morning (mp3)
My friend Leland, a will-be-well-known author who has written three novels and counting, travels around the world for work, and treats his time in the air as time to write, time to think. I envy that amount of dedicated writing time, but fundamentally hate flying: I find it terrifying—yes, I know all of the typical arguments about the safety of flying vs driving, biking, etc, but those things are on the ground, somewhere human beings are meant to be, not thousands of feet in the air, where birds and the spacemen are meant to be. For instance, here is something meant to be in the air: