As happens so often to me this summer, I’m swinging in my hammock in the backyard, reveling in a haze so thick you’d swear it was an opiate. It’s not, by the way, it’s just a cloud of sweet, sweet unemployment hovering over me, making the nearby birds bored and the mosquitoes lazy.

The unemployment buzz is just temporary, however – that gap between classes ending and a new job beginning has left me plenty of time to be bored and enjoy the hell out of it. It has also left me tons of time to read and write. The writing has been the subject of this column for some time – I think it’s high time I talk about reading as well.

Sitting on the small shelf next to me is a copy of the Best American Short Stories (the 2005 edition) edited by Michael Chabon. If you’ve never checked out the BASS series, you certainly should. Each year presents some of the most truly spectacular fiction by writers famous and not, compiled and edited by a different editing or writing bigwhig. This year, for example was compiled and edited by Steven King (yes, that Steven King).

Sometimes, a fiction writer needs a jumpstart. Usually I’ll pick up whatever I happen to be reading at the time (right this instant it’s World War Z by Max Brooks), but other times I’ll reach for the BASS collection. I give 20 minutes of my time to sift through a handful of pages, and I’ll absorb a self-contained story and a big jolt of inspiration that could really lead anywhere.

For example, instead of writing something original, I wrote a column about reading to get ideas for writing. Soooo existential.

Regardless, if you’re looking for a good read, I seriously recommend the BASS series. The newest versions are somewhat expensive, but you can find last year’s best short stories at a used book store for cheap – and the stories don’t spoil with age.

I will now return to my unemployed high. I love summer.

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I wonder when my funny died.

For the longest time as a kid, I was known amongst my friends for being very, very funny. I was quick on the draw with an insult, comebacks would snap away like a whip, and I can joke or deadpan like a comedian. Comedy Central was my favorite channel, and Douglas Adams was my favorite author.
I’ve grown up a lot in ways I like. Responsibility, ambition. Spiritually, I feel closer to my center than I have in a long time, and being an adult is actually kind of fun.

But somewhere along the line, I lost the ability to write “funny”. Somewhere between a needless war, a dangerously powerful president, pathetic ass-covering politicians, the mainstream adulation of Paris Hilton as a celebrity to look up to, a war in Lebanon (again), terror warning level Orange, and China becoming an economic superpower – somewhere between “I care about you but this isn’t working” and “I need $100 by Tuesday or I can’t pay bills,” I forgot what it was like to feel a good belly-laugh. And the thought of being able to cause a good chuckle became foreign to the level of impossibility.

I’m sarcastic and jaded. I’m quick on the insult that isn’t funny but painful. I can recite comedian lines like lines from a script, and my favorite author is Chuck Palahniuk. I only watch Comedy Central to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but then feel outraged instead of entertained. I get informed, but feel the burden of too much information to laugh.

I miss being funny. When did I stop laughing? I could joke and joke and write some very funny stories. I forget where that went. I’m too wrapped up the world – it’s so hard to see the humor in it.

I am Jack’s destroyed sense of humor.

Shit. How does this happen to us? How do we forget the simple pleasures? I’m done feeling this terrible about the world. I want to laugh again.

Knock knock.

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My roommate, Scott, has a bulletin board above his desk. The board, a rectangular brown cork board from Target, is decorated, interestingly enough, like a scrap book. Pictures, cards, notes to himself all make up this page that always changes – a daily reflection on his present personality. A little like a MySpace profile, but without all the lame.

Scott changes the wall often, perhaps because he is the most introspective person I’ve ever met. There’s a difference between smarts – book smarts or wisdom or worldliness – and introspection, though. You could be an idiot and still manage to pull off introspection. But fortunately for Scott, he’s also an exceptionally smart guy and he has a lot of self to analyze.

Nestled between a to-do list, a budget and a work schedule are random objects and papers – the playing card he found in the park, poems he jotted down, song lyrics and Album cover art. We were talking this afternoon, and I noticed a new decoration on the board. Printed in sharpie script on simple orange paper, it reads:

I’m going to write a novel in the next year.

The note is up in the top left corner of the board - the same spot that, when you were a kid, you would sign your name on your school papers. It occurs to me that the same kind of thing is happening there on Scott's board. In a way, Scott is signing his bulletin with a name for the year. This year will be entitled: The Novel.

Scott, like me, is the literary type. Last year he attempted the NaNoWriMo, but fell short after about 30,000 words – which is still pretty damn good. This year we’ve both decided to participate – which I’m sure you’ll hear endlessly about come November. NaNoWriMo attempts to attack The Block, which, when it comes to writing, is a potent psychological barrier. When it comes to the daunting prospect of writing a book, many writers turn away from what can only be described as a monumental task.

I mean, a book, you know? A column can take an hour, a research paper can take a week - but 50,000 words? 200 double-spaced pages in a word processor? Such things can seem impossible.

Scott is old for a student - there's no polite way to say it. At 29, he's had to go back to school to finish his degree, and he's playing student games of financial aid, term papers and homework while being very much into adulthood; while being very much a part of the "real world." Even though he's only inches away from his degree, I wonder if Scott ever thinks of his education as an impossibility. An unlikelihood even more far-fetched than a fresh faced kid churning out 50,000 words from his soul. Surely there can be more than one kind of impossible.

But there goes Scott, signing a name for impossible. Sometimes, Scott gives me hope that he should probably save for himself, but I appreciate it all the same.

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Update from last week: I did not get kicked in the nuts. In fact, I emailed THREE magazines instead of the two required for the safety of my jewels.

Thanks to this work, and the drive it lit under me, I am able to turn my attention to Faster Than The World’s First Birthday with my balls in relative safety. I say relative, of course, because I have a cat who will attack anything dangly, and it’s only a matter of time before her hunting habits and my showering habits undergo an epic collision.

I’ve been very happily involved in FTTW since December 2006. I was (and still am) an avid visitor of Fark.com, and was happily clicking through the profiles of those elite and oh-so-cool TotalFarkers. One poster, a nice lady named woodpecker from mars mentioned in her profile that she ran an online daily online magazine.

I started reading around and, eventually, made a post about my favorite charity and signed the post with my Fark name. It was some 7 hours later that I had an email waiting for me, asking me if I might be interested in contributing a column to the magazine. I promptly shit myself in surprise and accepted, and have now been chronicling my efforts to become a published freelancer since December 19th of last year.

And so, with this birthday approaching, I was reflecting on the nature of friendship. For the longest time in our society, friends were the people with whom you physically surrounded yourself. The advent of the internet, and the ability to surround yourself with mental personalities instead of physical ones, has given our social boundaries a shove way beyond where our physical boundaries still lie. I’ve now made friends – good, smart, honest, interesting people – who live in cities that I’ve never visited and lead lives that I’m not familiar with. But that doesn’t make these friends any less real – we have a magazine office that’s as concrete as any business building, the things that we hope our publication will achieve are just as ambitious.

The writers of FTTW are, indeed, a select bunch. Our email threads last into the hundreds of messages as inappropriate confessions collide with intellectual conversations. Why, just last week we had a grown man take a picture of his hairy man-nipple and email it to the rest of us.

But everything we do would devolve into a useless circle-jerk if it wasn’t for you, the readers. Without you, the things we do here, the stories we tell, would be just as lonely as when they sat in the bottom of our notebooks.

So thank you, readers. And thanks to Michele and Turtle and the editors, as well. I can’t wait to help FTTW plow into its second year, and I hope you’ll all join me in holding on for the ride.

This has not been a paid annoucement

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“So I’ll cut you a deal,” he says, leaning against the wall of the airport terminal. I’m in the car driving through the Dallas rain, and he’s in Hawaii trying to catch a military transport back to San Antonio.

I’d been talking to my friend Will, who is a proud member of my support system, as I drove back towards Denton. I was filling him in on the crap the Dallas Morning News was trying to get me to do before they would print my article. I had mentioned that I was considering sending the same article to a couple of different religious magazines.

He sounded intrigued, then offered up a vague “deal,” which, in turn, intrigued me. Whenever Will is going to bargain with you, it’s bound to be good. I tell him that I’m listening.

“Yeah, here’s the deal. You’re going to send that story out to two places this week.”

“Yeah…”

“And you have to do it this week, because I’m coming up to Dallas the next week.”

“Yeah…”

“And when I get up there, if you haven’t mailed the articles, I’m going to kick you straight in the balls.”

“…”

I don’t really know what I was expecting. I was certainly not expecting a counter offer that, if I did mail the articles away on time, I could kick him in the balls. I laughed.

I accepted the terms, and sealed the deal. Because it will be funny, that’s why.

When you’re freelancing, especially when you’re just beginning, setbacks are going to happen. If you can’t accept the fact that some people won’t like your writing, or that some people don’t see your story in their magazine, or that some people just loathe you as a person – you’re not going to make it.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the Dallas Morning News was interested in an article I’d written for their weekly religion spread. Well they emailed me back, and said they’d changed their minds and are no longer interested. Great, right? However, they’ll still consider the work pending two things: I get several more sources and do some more “journalistic footwork,” and that I rewrite the piece to take out “a lot of the description.” Yes, they really want that.

There is a couple of up-sides to this, however. The first is that I now have my first assignment from the DMN – I can interview people “for a piece in the Morning News” now, and not be lying! The second is that the piece I have now and the piece that will run in the news will be so vastly different from one another that I can confidently solicit magazines for publishing of the longer original draft – and get paid for original work instead of a much less lucrative reprinting pay.

So, when all is said and done, I’ll have turned my one class paper into two separate entities that will be sold to two different venues. I’m learning that this is a key in this business – multiply the work you do, so that you earn more cash per word. When I get started on this tomorrow morning, I’ll have begun my summer of freelancing, and I’ll have mailed away two more articles for publication.

Well I’ll have to, anyway, so I won’t get kicked in the nuts.

Ian had to go. Someone was going to kick him in the nuts

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"Exactly how much do you know about my project?"

My face tightens. We're sitting in his small, dark office. Books line the perimeter of the room like a dusty mosaic-styled wallpaper, and the cracked venetian blinds show a gray North Texas sky brooding, like Christian Bale on a bender.

"Erm, nothing, unfortunately. It was rather hard to find anything," I say, a bit meekly. Shit.

"So let me get this straight... it looks to me as though you're hiring me - free of charge - to help you with a class assignment. And it seems, further, that you've arrived at this interview completely unprepared, expecting me to just tell you everything you need to know. And how could you even know that what I'm telling you is true?" His words sound angered, but his face just looks exasperated.

His well-receded hairline has been trimmed to a buzz cut, and his thin, angular face is hidden behind glasses big enough to be a pair of Aviators. Such glasses would surely eclipse the face of anyone not endowed with such a beak-like nose; it looks like it allows him to look down on everyone he meets. Behind those glasses, though, the eyes are kind - like the eyes of your father when you both know that you've done something very stupid.

He continued to ask me questions he already knew the answers to, including "you are supposed to do research, right?" and "Do you have any idea who "Emil L. Fankenheim is?". Shit.

"Tell you what," he says, folding his long hands and placing them on his desk as he leans forward, "I've got my office hours again at 11, at 1, and at 4, and you can come back any time you need," It wasn't a suggestion.

I "yessir"d myself straight out of the room and into the hallway, where I had a quiet moment alone to reflect on my hatred of everything (including, but not limited to blue-tooth earpieces, very small dogs, "lite" beers, Modern Art and bees), then I walked quickly down the flights of stairs, out the double glass doors and into the stifling humidity.

I had just been taught a lesson in doing things right.

Before every interview, no matter with whom, I always do about an hour's worth of background. I always know where they're from, what schools they went to, basically everything that Google can possibly turn up, and as much as possible about whatever they want to talk to me about. Always, that is, except for last Friday, when deadline crunches had me doing four interviews a day for three days in a row. The young Indian man I'd interviewed the afternoon before had been kind enough to happily enlighten me when I'd asked what his student organization's name stood for -something I could have known with a passing glance and 4 seconds on the Internet.

But this man, this man had been around the block. He'd taught in universities in Israel during wars, he'd had parents and relatives taken up in the Holocaust. He'd been teaching for approximately twice as long as I'd been alive.

And he wasn't going to take my shit.

I'm sure there was a point to this story, in that kind of "the moral of the story is to always..." kind of way, but I'd be lying if I said I could remember it now. I just thought we could all get together, crack a beer, and reflect on the lessons we've learned, and the assholes we've hated for teaching them to us. Cheers.

One day, Ian will get it right. In the meantime, at least he has Lite beer from Miller

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It seems like everything is all happening at once around here.

As I'm trying to ready more stories to head away to the great beyond, I have received word that a bit of my journalism has caught the attention of the Dallas Morning News, the major daily newspaper for the North Central Texas area. They now wish to photocopy my words thousands of times before hitting me in the crotch with a briefcase full of money and running away giggling. The methods and traditions of the publishing business continue to perplex me.

Understandably, this sudden thrust of professionalism has come as a bit of a shock, and I've spent most of the weekend making sure I'm not going to embarrass myself in front of the readership of the 10th-largest newspaper in the country. In light of this new deadline, coupled with a quickly-approaching end of a semester and the several papers and tests that come with it, I've decided that sleeping is for the weak and that I can function perfectly well by main-lining those little 5-hour Energy Shots. *twitch*

So I've been thinking a lot about the importance of support lately. Quite frankly, I think that, after talent and dedication, a supportive group around you can make or break a beginning writer. Sure, you might eventually write the Great American Novel in an effort to get back at them. However, given the current state of the publishing industry, going nuts with a shotgun and a club would be a much more efficient method of revenge.

My support system, rather unoriginally, consists of my family and friends. My parents still ask me to mail them copies of everything (which I'm sure are stored in an underground bunker in case someone dares claim that I don't actually exist), and my best friend honestly sounds more excited than I am about my latest progresses. But, importantly, my girlfriend is my main support. I don't think any of us could do the things we do without a significant other who cheers us on.

More than just cheers, though, my girl is a really critical part of The Plan. You know, The Plan for the next few years - and beyond. Like most things, it's simple economics. For example: say I was to come home tomorrow and slam out 10 articles for various venues, then mail them away with a 100% chance of getting them published (that won't happen, by the way). Sounds successful, right? Given that level of writing succes, I would probably starve to death. You see, those manuscripts, brilliant and money-making though they are, will not get me a single dime for a period of 2 months to a year. I may earn $30,000 in a year freelancing, but it will be $5,000 in June, $700 in July, $2,000 in August, etc. And that kind of thing just can't pay the grocery bills.

So here's to my girl! *raises beer* If she leaves me, I'll almost certainly die!

Tell me: Who is your support system? Did you ever have someone who didn't believe in you?

Ian is just discovering the wonders of a jock strap

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One of the most important things that I'm struggling with in my writing right now is learning how to revise. Now, copy editing and grammar checks - those I have no problem with. But revision - true revision - is something else entirely.

It occurs to me that I have never really extolled the virtues of having a teacher before. If that's true, it's long overdue: writing is very much an apprentice art, and having a good teacher is damn near mandatory. It can be a professor, editor or friend that can teach you, or it can be the religious reading of all of a favorite author's books. Either way: if we had to start all over and make up the process of writing from scratch with each generation, we would never have gotten better than the ancient Greek myths or the tales of Homer.

Ok, bad example.

Regardless: my teacher, a man named Amos, taught me many things in our short time together. He taught me that background characters still have to be characters ("his mother can't just stand in the kitchen stirring sauce all day!"), he taught me how to accept criticism gracefully ("Shut up! No talking while we insult your writing!". But most of all, he taught me how to revise.

Revision is a difficult thing to explain, which makes me send that many more kudos towards Amos for doing it so well. Basically, take this scenario: you have a friend who is awful at telling jokes. He stammers towards the punchline, omits important information, then giggles so hard that he can't finish and you're left wondering what exactly happened after the two Jewish guys walk into the bar (they BUY it!).

You, however, listen to this rambling, broken, shambles of a joke and note in the back of your mind that it might possibly have potential to be funny someday. And when that day comes, you recite the joke at the office Christmas party - you color the characters, you add flavor and extra dialogue and you pause just long enough before the punchline to make the delivery ever so perfect.

The story is the same, but the delivery has been re-imagined to omit the unnecessary, to strengthen the crucial and to set up the plot twist at the end for maximum affect.

This is the process I've been working on for Regular Guys as I've been preparing it to be sent away to meet its destiny. The problem is this: when I wrote it, to be completely honest, I had no idea where I was going with it. I just got this idea about two guys setting out on a road trip to nowhere, so I picked it up and ran. It turned into something pretty interesting, but then it just ran out of gas. I wrestled and fought with it and tortured out an ending, but there was just too much time spent in the middle of the piece not knowing what was going on, and it showed. People read it and said "....what?"

So now I'm going back through and trimming the fat. Starting from scratch, I'm rewriting. I know where the story is going to end up and who the characters are, and now I'm just going to tell the joke with less stammering, stuttering, and giggling at my own cleverness. The most important strategy to a good revision is distance: you simply cannot effectively revise a story that you wrote an hour ago. You're too attached to it. At a minimum, wait about a month. My man Amos suggests that you leave a story alone for a year, but I gots groceries to buy, so a month will have to do.

The plan is to mail it out this week, and see what happens.

In a similar vein as last week's Parental Advice trainwreck, share the nuggets of wisdom that your teachers have given you.

Celebrity Update: Nothing yet from the first editor, but the publication guidelines say I may have to wait six months for a response. Celebrity has now been sent to three different magazines, so we'll see who gets back to me first.

Ian says there will there'll be no nose job. Said dodio-doe, no nose job (he's smarter than that)

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Well, school is coming to a close; I'm right in the middle of that lull between midterms and finals, and summer is approaching real quick-like. The big change this year is that I have formally decided not to look for a summer job. The gig at the newspaper will effectively run dry over the summer, so I was pressed between finding a service job where I can hate my life or making the really uncomfortable jump to subsisting entirely on cash from published articles.

Especially considering that I'm still waiting on hearing on that first article, it's definitely a gamble. But I guess we all have to make that decision at some point: play it safe, or go for the gusto? If I actually manage to write (and then publish) enough articles to feed myself for three months, I will have a resume that I could beat a bear to death with. And if I don't, well. That's why parents always seem to have so much money just lying around, right? Yeah, I know. I'm a leech.

In order to make this work, I'm going to have to make one serious change to my writing habits: I need to learn how to multi-task. I've already started, sort of. Right now, I'm working on:

• Getting 1200-word feature (originally written as a paper for a midterm) into shape for publication. I'm hoping that a Christian news magazine will run it and throw a bucket of money at me.
  
• Polishing up a short story that I shared the first page or so of, Regular Guys. It's actually a pretty old one, but it needs a serious revamp. The story, when I describe it to people, is very “ohhh, that's cool” - but when people read it they're like “I don't get it. He did what now?”. I think I'm just going to entirely revise it, a process that I'll go into next week.
  
• I have a possible idea that could be turned into a 5- or 10- part series. It's top secret for the moment, and will stay that way until I get some of it written and email an editor or two.
  

At a general average of $750 an article, I need to get paid for only two articles a month. That's really not a whole lot, but I need to start now if I want the checks to start coming in during the summer months that I'll need them.

So, facing the rather real possibility of having to choose between begging my parents for grocery money and loosing a whole bunch of weight on the Ethiopia Diet, I embark from the precipice. It’s make it or break it time.

What’s the scariest career/life move you’ve ever had to make?

The editors of FTTW have all their money on the bear in the Ian's Resume v. Big Bear fight.

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This week we have the special privilege of talking with Leah Shafer, who has worked as a professional, full-time freelance writer for the last three years. You can find her work in The Dallas Observer, Quick, Luxe, Modern Bride, American Way, The Meeting Professional, Rx.com and several other publications. Her corner of the web is over at LeahShafer.com.

It only took 15 minutes AND I got her to reveal her secret ambitions for world domination.

ME: How did you first get your start? I hear there was some drinking involved.

Leah: Well, actually, I lost my job and basically came home and cried for a week, and I only had two weeks’ severance pay. So I kind of thought I would try to augment my unemployment wages from the state by writing some freelance things. And by the time I ran out of my unemployment benefits I was writing quite a significant amount. I decided I would go ahead and take a stab at it.

One of the things that I have a lot of trouble with is finding time to write. Is that a problem of yours? Was it a problem at the beginning?

It’s always a problem. There’s a joke among my friends about how busy I am, that I am basically never not working. I’m thinking about something, brainstorming. I spend a great deal of time on the weekends and at night; if I’m watching TV I have my laptop on my lap and I’m frequently Googling.

So yes, it is a challenge to find the time, especially if you’re working a full time job and you can’t interview people because your day is already taken up. Email is a wonderful thing because you can just email questions to people.

How often do you send an unsolicited piece out to an editor? What is your advice on query letters?

Right now, my plate is really full with assignments; I have myself booked up until August in terms of my work. So currently, I don’t do very many unsolicited pieces – although I’m getting ready to go up to Vancouver next week for a piece I’m writing and I’m going to try to put together a couple of extra pieces on top of that – so I will be doing an unsolicited manuscript drop at several different travel editors around the country.

I always recommend that people do a full-on pitch. A lot of editors will look at it, and a well-written pitch can be sent to 15 people; each one that turns you down, you just move on to the next one.

So… about getting paid to write about your experiences while you take a free vacation: how do I get on that gravy train?

Basically, you start doing some travel articles for different newspapers. Then, over time, you try to pitch yourself and your ideas to travel magazines or “industry” magazines – like the people that I do most of my travel writing for is a meeting planner’s organization (because meeting planners travel all the time).

So you’ve just got think about who pays you to travel places and then you just get an assignment from your editor. Then you take that assignment and email it to the Convention or Visitor’s Bureau people and often those people will say “Come on up! Come to Toronto, come to Louisiana, come to Utah!” then they’ll put you up in a hotel.

It’s really exciting, but it’s also really, really hard. I have to say, travel writing is way less glamorous than I ever imagined.

What is your goal for the future? Is freelancing for TIME magazine as good as it gets, or do you ultimately have other plans?

I want to be QUEEN OF THE WORLD! I’m always aiming for larger circulation and higher pay. I mean, always. You know, the goal is to be able to make a whole lot of money without much effort. So I would love to get $4000 where they send me to Dubai where I’ll hang out by the pools all day.

Best single piece of advice that you could give someone hoping to start freelancing?

Get. A. Laptop. I’m totally serious; getting a laptop changed my life and made freelancing possible. I can take it on the road with me and as long as there’s an open Wi-Fi connection, I’m in touch with my editor and I’m in touch with my sources and I can write from the road.

If you could go back to the beginning of your freelancing career, say, the day before you started – what would you tell yourself about what the next three years were going to be like?

I don’t think I’d want to know – I’d be too scared. I think I’d probably tell myself to aim higher and spend less time on the small-time newspapers. Just pretty much, except for travel writing, ignore newspapers because they’re a huge amount of work for not much money. In the end it, unfortunately, becomes completely about the money.

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TO: Magical Councils Co.

FROM: Ian C. Birnbaum

Dear Witches and/or Wizards unknown:

Were I a lesser man, I might tell you just what I thought of your mother’s (eager but ultimately unsatisfying) sexual performance last night. Or I might tell you that I hope you acquire the AIDS virus via a violent anal molestation by an enraged silverback gorilla. Alas, as I am a man of character and aplomb, I will mention neither these nor other petty attacks on your sad, lonely characters.

I am writing to you because it has come to my attention that you have all been having some fun at my expense. What I had originally imagined to be an unhappy string of coincidences has now clearly become an engineered attack upon my good fortunes. And, although the magical man or woman who hatched the plan to jinx me with a devastatingly bad luck is to be commended on their comedic schadenfreude, I feel that the joke has carried on for long enough.

Since your childish voodoo began three days ago, I have suffered, to a greater or lesser extent, terrible luck at every moment, both day and night.

On Saturday morning, I drove an hour south to Fort Worth to pick up ingredients for my latest homebrew project – a nice scotch ale. After battling through rush-hour caliber traffic at 2 p.m. on a Saturday, I began brewing. At seemingly random intervals the brew would boil over, apparently in a measured effort to catch me while I was in the bathroom and to scare living hell out of my cat (who then puked on the carpet, thank you). Having my thermometer spontaneously shatter, scattering glass, lead, and mercury into the beer mere seconds before it was finally completed was a particularly evil finishing touch.

On Sunday afternoon I spent 15 minutes arguing with a retarded toll booth attendant who insisted that I had "stolen a toll ticket", whatever that means. She was so busy attempting to wink at me with her one lazy eye that her supervisor had to sprint across the freeway to the booth, allow me to pass and then, presumably, up her medication.

And yesterday, as I was driving my motorcycle past Elm and Congress, a horrific gust of wind rose up and yanked my new iPod nano straight out of my pocket. How wind managed to achieve such dexterity I’m sure I don’t know, but watching as $200 of hardware and music memory floated for an instant before crashing into the street behind my rear tire is a horror I’ll not soon forget.

Indeed, every time, over the last few days, that it has rained only for the five minutes that I’m taking out the trash; that I somehow managed to cut myself 34 times while shaving; that all of the pages of a brand new book tore from the binding and dropped onto the floor; that the 8-ball would rather spontaneously explode like a small black grenade than obediently drop into the chosen corner pocket; – every time, I knew it was you.

Whoever you are: stop. Lift the curse of unluckiness. Please. The only thing distracting me from actively contemplating suicide is the thought of one day finding you, force-feeding you three gallons of gasoline, then punching you in the gut and lighting a match.

Best Regards,

Ian Birnbaum

P.S.: Having my car accidentally impounded and crushed was not funny, not even a little bit. Cunts.

Word Whore Archives

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Every writer I know has done it, at least once or twice. You sit down at the computer / typewriter / notebook / stone tablet and you focus your mind on putting some serious words down. And then, four hours later, you're still staring at the blank slate – only now you're actively contemplating setting the building on fire just to accomplish something.

And now you're thinking “what's wrong with me?” or “what happened to my muse?” and you feel like you're out of control or some part of your brain has broken down. You feel useless. So what do you do?

I, for one, have a notoriously fickle brain. Sometimes I will slam 50 pages out in a day, sometimes I will go a week without putting more than 30 words together. And as the planets spin and the stars align, every once in a while I get stumped just at the wrong moment.

The key is to relax. Yes, I know your deadline is coming in only 7 hours and I know that your boss will literally tear off his toupee and beat you around the face with it if you don't have something spectacular and the kids are screaming and your significant other is a raving lunatic and the dogs need to be fed and you just don't... Just cool it. No wonder your brain is freaking out, and you want it to be creative right now? Take deep breaths, grit your teeth and just start typing.

Without fail, this has always worked for me. I just sit back, close my eyes (unless you can't type without looking at the keyboard, I do endorse closing the eyes) and just type. Type your thoughts, type the crap you're worried about, type “I don't know what to write I don't know what to write” over and over again.

And then, suddenly, you type something that makes some kind of sense. And then another something. And then you get an idea for where those two somethings can hook up in the copy room and spawn a thousand other fucking awesome little somethings and, before you know it, you're back on track.

Or, if you write an online column about the life and times of a budding writer, you can just write a column about having writer's block. Sometimes life throws you the easy-out.

Think I'm making this up? Here is a direct copy/paste of the 127 words that came before the beginning of this column. The blank word document I've been staring at for hours remained blank until I gave up and just started typing. It is not pretty, it is not grammatical, and some of it is terribly lame. In short, it should never be exposed to daylight, but here it is anyway:

I don't know what to write fuck damn crap I just can't think of anything

Oh, man, I'm going to write about overcoming the inability to write. I'm such a cheap bastard.

So tell me: what was the worst writer's block you ever had? What was at stake? Did you get over it in time? What was the fallout?

The Word Whore Archives

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Brevity. Practice. Shorter=better. Mostly fun. Enjoy.

Elliot Briggs was a stalwart old man. His 78 years draped around him like a torn cloak about his sagging shoulders.

When the street near his shop changed, Elliot would sigh, tap his cane three times in the dirt before him and spit a long brown streak into the dust that settled into his store and aged wrinkles ‘round his grey eyes.

The more things changed, the more Elliot would tap his cane, until, one day, the only thing different was that there was no one to tap the cane, and the brown stain slowly dried into the dust around it.

Words: 101

Perspective: Omniscient Third

Jim’s knees shook, his usual response to a nervous state. Both of them had been trapped in the stalled elevator for only an hour, but now, with the carriage rumbling downwards, they stood together reluctantly.

They had connected – necessary acquaintances blossomed into potent friends in the dim space they had shared between 4 and 5.

When the elevator stopped, Jim let her step out first. She turned.

“I –“

Jim’s phone rang; he silenced it. She looked hopeful, but he said quietly, “my wife.”

He turned away, and she watched his retreating back grow smaller, a quiet tear near her eye.

Words: 101

Perspective: Limited Third

How’d it start? Well, Jay takes this gummy worms bag and licks one, then throws it at the ceiling - it sticks! Like Susan's Margolow’s panties after prom, they stick like GorillaGlu. In 20 seconds this whole bag - 1000 piece assorted worms, but tasting all the same – is on the ceiling of a century-old hotel room!

Sean walks in. Laughing, he’s like, "you’re fucked!"; Teacher’s coming around checking we're not breaking shit. Panic.

Since we are breaking shit, we freak out. Try jumping at the little bastards. Can’t reach. Thinking fast, we slam off the lights and dive to bed, clothes still on.

Teacher comes in, pleased we're in bed and the place isn't on goddamn fire; he can't see the worms. We pretend to sleep, so he leaves. He's at the doorway, paused, and this 6 inch long, slimy-with-spit-and-stucco red and green monstrosity comes spinning out of the darkness and slaps him in the forehead.

In the dark we see him turn purple, and he rams the light switch so hard the lady above us had her bulbs burn out.

As he's screaming his lungs out, I've never been closer to pissing myself, I was laughing so damn hard.

Words: 201

Perspective: First

Done! :flexes:

Word Whore Archives

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“You know that hum that you can only get from pavement? You know, that noise that just sorta- just sorta vibrates in your brain, and the only thing that can make that sound is rubber on road for hundreds of miles at a stretch?” Brian looked away from the lines of the highway blurring past beneath the aging Cadillac and looked to the passenger side at his – for lack of an official job title – closest friend in the world. The companion in question was staring devotedly at the tip of his own nose, trying to pluck an overgrown hair with the tips of his fingers. Brian observed his efforts for just long enough to be considered recklessly negligent, then returned his eyes to the two globes of light in front of him that revealed the dark surface of I-90. The tires hummed in unison in the hot night. Silence prevailed until he tried again. “Sam?”

Sam started in his seat, an action that not only brought his attention back to the present world, but also brought his attempts to pluck the offending hair to an abruptly successful conclusion.

“Owwww- fuck…” Sam swiveled his face towards Brian while massaging the tip of his nose with one hand. “Somethin’ about hummers?” he ventured after a moment of guilty silence. Brian regarded Sam coldly from out of the corner of his right eye, his face pointed stubbornly at the road, the shine of the headlights, the blurred yellow streaks rushing past into the darkness behind them.

Brian repeated himself. Sam grunted his assent, which was characteristically the most elaborate use of phrase for his half of any of Brian’s metaphorical conversations. The tires hummed, a third voice in this conversation on the lonely road.

“Because when you really think about it,” Brian continued, pleased that his audience was, indeed, thoroughly captive, “right, when you really ponder on it that sound, that damned humming, is just a big metaphor for – wait for it – for women,” he declared, spitting the last word triumphantly.

Sam groaned. The tires hummed.

For the three days that the two of them had been on the road headed east, Brian had spent the days sleeping and the nights driving and imagining analogies to describe all of the various ways that women, as a population, were collectively plotting to make any owner of a penis very unhappy. This had been prompted, of course, by the unceremonial and unapologetic dumping of Brian by his longtime on-again/off-again girlfriend, a feminist speaker and author who was rather well known, in their small town outside Seattle, for being a total bitch.

“Come on bro, lets hit the fucking road man,” Brian had yelled at Sam through the rolled-down window of the Cadillac. Sam had been walking back to his apartment from the central mailbox of the complex when Brian had turned the corner and almost run him over, his tires and the road slick from the near-constant Washingtonian rain. Sam had opened the passenger door against the lazy evening storm drifting sideways across the coast and climbed inside as Brian slammed the accelerator, nearly running down two stray dogs and an elderly couple.

They turned out of Sam’s apartment complex and started east on I-90 from Issaquah, Washington and continued east on I-90 for the rest of the night. At first it was driving just to get away, but when the morning sun’s glaze illuminated rain-clouds directly before them and Brian continued driving in silence, it became driving to get somewhere else. Sam saw, but could not decipher, the look on Brian’s scowling features: his eyes were strained from looking but not seeing, mind clouded by its contents, too proud to cry, too angry to be proud, heart too broken to be truly angry, driving himself and his thoughts and his friend through the rain and away from everything behind him.

Archives

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One of the things I’ve started doing in an effort to get something, anything, down on paper is what’s called “improv writing.” I just start writing and randomly name the characters and situations off the top of my head. Sometimes something good comes out of it, and sometimes utter crap comes out. Sometimes you get a character and a situation that are interesting, and you want to see more of them. Just like investing, where it takes money to make more money, here it takes writing to make good writing.

All of my writing this week, though, hasn’t been as good as one improv I did almost a year or two ago. As such, I thought I’d reach way back in the archives and share this one with you; bear in mind that it was written in about 10 minutes.

Fairly recently, in a nearby small town, then was a young man named Joe. Among the many notable things about Joe, perhaps the most notable was that he had a dog named Archibald. In fact, Archibald was the most notable thing in the entire town (it was a very, very small town). Joe and Archibald made quite the pair, always following each other around; usually, contrary to popular opinion, Joe was the one doing the following.

Ok, so this story is mostly about Archibald. Archibald and his human, Joe. Archibald was a tall, muscular dog with a proud face and a distinguished nose; his human was just sort of ugly. Every day at four o'clock, Archibald would suddenly take off running into the hillside, nimbly ducking branches and hopping rocks and leaving in his wake only a whoosh of wind and grass and the huff-puffing and ethnic slurring of Joe, who was wildly out of shape and always felt better about his fitness levels when he insulted various persons of various colors.

Archibald had such excellent agility, however, that he would eventually leave Joe behind and would, for a short while, be all alone in the hills and crests of his home in the crappy little town. And every day when Archibald returned to the small farmhouse, Joe would always ask him, "where ya been, mutt?" then spit some tobacco juice onto one of Archibald's paws. Archibald would stare up at his human, shake his head sadly and go circle something enough times to warrant a good lie-down.

Life continued in this plodding, monodramatic way for poor Archibald, surrounded by the concentrated dosage of redneck that was Joe. One day, after many weeks and months of Archibald's daily run-aways and slow-returns, Joe was sitting in his rocking chair underneath his confederate flag and was waiting for Archibald to return from the hills. Off in the distance, he saw an approaching spot that materialized into Archibald, slowly plodding his way back home. When Archibald finally closed the distance, he looked up at his human, who spat and said "where ya been, mutt?

Suddenly, Archibald leapt back on his hind legs, grabbed Joe by his filthy collar with his front paws and pushed him down onto the porch and shouted "I've been trying to get away from your damn nasty stench, you sack of crap! Christ!" Joe stared back up at Archibald completely dumbfounded.

Archibald walked off to find some shade to sleep in, and Joe very slowly got up off the ground and dusted himself off. Very carefully, he said to himself, "I gots ta git rid of that thar dog--he must be broken."

This story is so good it even comes with a moral. The moral of this story? Adopt a pet from a shelter, because you never know what retarded reason some hillbilly had for putting them there in the first place.

Archives

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[CAMERA fade In]

[A crowded, dirty, office meeting room. Trash litters the floor, and stacks of philosophy textbooks prop up the tables and clutter the chairs. Tattered pornography hangs in the windows]

JOSH: Hey, thanks for coming everybody. I know this meeting was impromptu, but we really needed a column idea for this Tuesday, and the deadline is coming up quicker than a freight train on a gimpy squirrel. Oh- sorry, Nutsy.

NUTSY: Yeah, whatever. Ass.

JOSH: Moving right along – I was thinking about something regarding writing good characters: how to develop them, how to really flesh out many competing personalities in just a short segment of writing.

NUTSY: Josh, I have a question.

JOSH: Yes?

NUTSY: You’re a tool.

JOSH: Let it go, Nutsy. Look, I’m just tossing this idea out there – any comments?

DR. HEIFEN: Jah, I theenk is good idea. Characters very important, no? All kinds writing. Verrrry important.

JOSH: Right – no matter what kind of writing you’re doing, the selection, development and use of the characters will be a key factor in the delivery of the story.

DR. HEIFEN: I theenk that most easiest way to show character is with dialogue. Capture how people talk - you show how people think. Make for compelling character, no?

PHILIP: Exactly! Like last night, on American Idol –

NUTSY: Oh don’t be that guy, Philip. Nobody likes that guy.

JOSH: Look, back on topic, please, ok? We have two tests in our classes this week and the less time we spend dicking around, the more time we have for studying.

KEVIN: Psh. Studying? So sorry to distract you from your books, there, Nancy Drew.

JOSH: There's no need for name-calling, Kev.

[NANCY DREW pokes her head into the room]

NANCY: Did somebody need something?

PHILIP: Um, no... but could you get us some coffee?

NANCY: Fuck you, Philip.

[NANCY DREW leaves]

KEVIN: OOoohh, SOMEBODY's still ticked about the office party.

PHILIP: Shut up, Kevin.

JOSH: Guys, PLEASE, we need --

NUTSY: Hey, you guys - you know what I hate? Winter.

KEVIN: Know what I hate? Rodents.

NUTSY: That's it - your nuts are mine!

KEVIN: Fine -just suck my dick while you're down there, Bullwinkle.

NUTSY: What? Bullwinkle wasn't even a squirrel - did someone lobotomise you when you were a child?

JOSH: Shit, guys, SHUT UP! How can we expect to get anything done when you're all running around in here yelling all the time? It's like watching a bunch of monkeys try to fuck a football.

KEVIN: Hey, that football was asking for it - didn't you see the way it was dressed?

[ALL start talking over each other, laughing and throwing paper]
[HOBBES pokes his head into the room]

HOBBES: Josh, could I talk to you? Calvin and I are having a... moment.

JOSH: What, again? Shit... yeah, whatever. It's not like this bunch of cerebral palsy patients was giving me any good material anyway.

[JOSH gets up and starts to leave]

NUTSY: Aw, don't be that guy, Josh. Nobody likes that guy.

[JOSH slams the door shut, fluttering all of the papers in the room with a gust of air]

NUTSY: [stands up, stretches] Later, chumps. I'm going to go check out the memory archives and look at all our ex-girlfriends naked.

[CAMERA zooms out of office window, out of office building into the night sky, above the murky canals and dimly-lit back alleyways; CAMERA gets darker until it fades to black]
[CAMERA pulls out of black and appears to have just exited IAN's left eye]

IAN: Sweet - I think I have an idea for this week's column!

IAN'S GIRLFRIEND: Wasn't that column due, like, an hour ago?

IAN: Don't be that guy, baby. Nobody likes that guy.

Archives

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Now that Celebrity is in the mail, the entire submission process is on hold - at least for a few weeks. The trick now is to keep writing and submitting, writing and submitting, so that when one of your stories happens to get picked up, you'll have previous submissions providing you with a stream of income until the payday comes in.

One thing that I've always been notoriously bad about is finding time to write. Just about everything I write, including these columns, are written because I have committed myself to a deadline and I have to meet it. Celebrity itself was actually a story I wrote, as an assignment, for a Creative Fiction class at the university (I got an A). This is fine, of course, for things like this column and breaking news stories at the paper, but, for a freelancer, this kind of work ethic just turns you into an unproductive waste of space. For freelancers, there ARE no deadlines. Celebrity could have been mailed tomorrow, or in a week from now, or not until the summer: the editor at Brutarian (unless he happens to read this column) doesn't even know yet that it's headed his way, much less that he really ought to buy it because it's great (nudge nudge, there, Mr. Editor).

So this past week I've decided to start something new. I'm a very busy guy, but every day without fail, I have some free time from 5-6 p.m. during the week. I used to watch TV or replay a level of Half-Life 2, but, starting this past Monday, I've been using that hour to write. I just sit and stare at a blank page, then start writing whatever comes to mind. Whether it's great or it's crap or it's just me bitching about my day, I've found that writing every day really helps oil the hinges of the creative mind.

For example, I came up with a premise for a narrative - I think it was on Tuesday that I jotted it down while I was writing in the back yard and my kitten was playing in the grass around me. It is essentially a fight-the-power story from feudal Japan involving supernatural powers and traditional tattoos - when I have more written on it I'll probably share more about it here. Is it great? Not really. Does it have promise? Potentially. It could be utter crap brought on by my current quest to get a bit of tattoo work done. But, whatever it is, it's some creative exercise. If it doesn't pan out, I will have gotten just that much more writing practice. And practice will eventually pay off when I write something really worth reading (and selling).

Other than this (potentially) productive development, all's quiet around here for while - at least until I hear back about Celebrity. In the next few weeks I'll just be sharing some snippets of short stories or just pondering life, the universe and everything.

So what time every day do you guys write? Time every week? What motivates you?

Kittens and grass are all it apparently takes to motivate Ian. Archives

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Over the last few weeks, I've been moving along through the process of getting a piece of writing ready to get published, on a freelance basis, in a magazine. Though I took a break last week, this week I'm finishing the real deal: "Celebrity" will be mailed by the time you read this column. After a lot of editing of the piece and torturing of myself, I've decided to just send it in and see what response I get. I might get published, I might not, but at least the piece will be off of my desk for a few weeks.

The final hurdle in the freelancing process for me to discuss here is query letters. Query letters may also be referred to as cover letters, but either way you're always trying to do the same thing: pimp your writing. No matter how sexy your writing may be, a potential buyer must first be wooed by the claims of a flashy salesman in a fur coat, assuring him that your curves are the sweetest available for any price. He must reach out and prey on the secret desires of an editor to read something new - "hey, man, you looking for a good time?"

I may have carried that analogy a little too far.

Nevertheless, your query letter must be your sales pitch to any prospective market. A successful salespitch has a few common elements:

1. Know your market.
Explain to the editor you are contacting why, exactly, your story is perfect for his magazine. Is it a theme that you know his readers will enjoy? Is it a brand new theme that is presented in a way that his readers might find interesting? Prove to the editor in the first couple of paragraphs that you aren't submitting your piece to everyone with a business card and he's not just a random shot in the dark, even if (ESPECIALLY if) he really is.

2. Introduce yourself
Show that you can write and how you got to be as good as you are. If you have been published before, mention that you have and where. If you haven't, don't mention it. Don't brag, but showing that you have experience may save your story from ending up in the recycling bin unopened. If the market you're selling to welcomes new writers and you are an unpbulished rookie, go ahead and mention that you're selling to them because of their history of giving new writers a chance.

3. Be professional
Address the editor by both names, or Mr. Smith. Write like you would speak in an important meeting or a job interview.

When you've written and edited your query letter as well (you don't want to sink yourself with a typo in the introductory letter), put both the query letter and your piece in the mail and wait the sometimes very long wait to hear back from the editor.

Because it can sometimes take so long between mailing a piece and hearing (anything) back from an editor, it is sometimes best to mail to several editors at once, especially if your piece is timely. I'll be writing more pieces and sending them off while I'm waiting to hear from the magazine that "Celebrity" is going to, but for the next few weeks this column is just going to be my personal playground. I'll clue you guys back in when I've been notified of "Celebrity"'s fate.

Wish me luck - and Godspeed, Celebrity.

Good Luck, Ian! Archives

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"A wise man climbs Fuji once, but only a fool would climb it twice."--Japanese Proverb
"I hate this fucking mountain" -- My proverb
"He didn't mean it Fuji-san, he's an idiot! Please forgive him!" -- My companion's apology to the mountain spirits for my proverb

Nine o'clock at night, somewhere near the 7th stage, Mt. Fuji, Japan: The two of us lay between two large boulders in a small outcropping, sharing body-warmth and the shelter provided by a small emergency rain poncho that bowed and floated as the wind whistled over it. We shivered there, huddled together. Strictly speaking, we weren't supposed to be resting without paying extortionate fees for a night-long stay in one of the small cabins that were scattered across the slopes; we had instead snuck off the well-marked trail until we found this small nook, and had settled down for a break and to warm ourselves. The weather was definitely getting worse.

Will and I, best friends through high school, had been climbing Mt. Fuji, Japan's sacred mountain and national icon, for about 4 hours. Starting from The 5th Gate, about 2300 meters above sea level, we began climbing the remaining 6300 meters at about 5 p.m. that day in July, 2005. The two of us had been in Japan for about 3 days on the trip that we had sworn we would take back when we were freshmen in high school; graduated now, and fluent in Japanese, we made good on our promise to each other and went. We had been watching Mount Fuji, referred to in Japanese with the honorific Fuji-san, for two days already when we began the morning that would end so many miles later with us cold, hungry and wet, trudging down the side of a dormant volcano two thousand miles from home.

Starting from the 5th gate, about half-way up the mountain, Fuji-san lures prospective climbers in with its beauty and an easy, sloping climb. From the massive hunting-lodge style buildings where one can find food and supplies for the climb to ponies offering to take riders farther up the mountain, anyone stupid enough not to know better would certainly assume that the climbing of Fuji-san is a symbolic pilgrimage, not a true pilgrimage of personal danger and sacrifice. If nothing else, the long, long trains of elderly Japanese, outfitted with walking sticks and parkas, embarking on a mountain climbing expedition would certainly give the impression that Mt. Fuji is iconic but mostly harmless. The guide books note, however, that no one should be dumb enough to attempt to climb the mountain wearing light summer clothes: I was wearing a hoody and my Converse high-tops. I'm certain, now, that the idea of being scaled by a punk American kid in Converse angered the mountain spirits greatly, and they proceeded to take a giant dump on the two of us.

We had been climbing for 20 minutes when we walked straight through a cloud that was sitting lazily, resting from its journey on the sides of the sacred slopes. Walking through the Japanese forests, rich with mosses and ferns, soon gave way to the desolate barren landscape of a now-retired volcano: rocks, gravel, sand, rocks. As the climb grew harder, sometimes to the point of lifting ourselves over rocks on hands and knees, the weather was growing worse. Wind and cold tore down the small corridors of the path carved into the mountain, and our energy ebbed and sank. We rested where we could, and [Will walks into a cloud] then again where we weren't allowed to, but we kept climbing until we could no longer see the towns in the valleys below.

The plan, in our minds, was to climb from 5 in the evening to 5 in the morning and then sit and watch the sunrise. It was an iconic, traditional goal: the kind of memory that you could proudly tell grandkids and friends for years to come. But I wasn't athletic, or even fit, and I was scraping the bottom of the barrel to continue taking steps through the volcanic gravel towards the top. I just kept saying to myself that I would climb this mountain no matter what - that I would make it to the top.

Hours later, near the eighth gate, I broke first and suggested that we sleep for a couple of hours (it was now about one in the morning) at a stupidly-priced wooden mountain shack. Sick from the altitude, tired and hungry, I got the worst three hours of sleep of my entire life. It wasn't enough, but we still wanted to be up so we could watch the sun rise over Japan from the peak of her holy mountain. We rose, bundled up, and stepped outside. To our dismay, the weather had only gotten worse, and hail and rain had joined the wind in pelting us directly in the face as we tried to climb through the soft, sifting red rock.

It was one of the defining moments of my life thus far: I gritted my teeth and walked, one foot in front of the other, because I was going to climb this mountain. The wind came barrelling down the zig-zagging corridors, physically pushing us back into our own footprints; with each step, the sliding rocks and the wind pushed us back half a step. The rain was frigid and horizontal, slowly soaking us to the bone and pulling warmth away from out bodies. I kept going, literally pulling myself along using a frozen steel handrail; no matter the shit, no matter the weather, no matter my legs burning like someone had set fire to my jeans, I was going to get on a plane and come home from Japan with the successful conquest of Fuji-san under my belt. I climbed as if my manhood, reputation, and life were staked on it, as if I would be shamed by coming home without reaching the top. It just wasn't meant to be.

As we neared the top: 400 meters, 300 meters, only 45 minutes to go, only 30 - we started to see people walking down the mountain on our trail instead of the standard descent path on a second face. We caught eyes with a German woman climbing down with her friend, and she told us that the weather was the worst on the peak, and that officials were sending down anyone who made it that far. We were apparently 20 minutes away from the peak, and were climbing into a full-on storm. Will and I looked at each other, reluctant to give up. I laugh now when I remember that we actually kept climbing for five minutes after receiving that news. We were moronically set on our goal, but we turned a corner and got a full blast of grit and rain on the wind: we shuddered, then turned and headed back down the mountain: 20 minutes would have to be close enough. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that the view of the sunrise would be obscured by the storm clouds, and we were in too much physical danger to keep going for pride alone.

And we did find ourselves, on our way down, in real physical danger. Because of the altitude sickness, Will had given me his rain poncho, which broke the wind and kept me considerably warmer than I should have been; conversely, Will was soaked and starting to feel hypothermic. We were sleep deprived and hungry. We slipped and scattered rocks on our fast retreat down the mountain, and I could see a glaze start to come over Will's eyes, and his teeth chattered. As we fled the storm, I gave back the poncho and put my arm around him and tried to rub circulation back into his limbs; most of all, I made sure we kept walking. He saved my ass on the way up, and I saved his ass on the way down.

Two years later, I still tell people that I climbed Mount Fuji in Japan. If they ask, I'll tell them that I never reached the top due to the weather, but failing to reach the peak never felt as disappointing as I imagined it would. There was certainly no shame brought down upon me. Fuji-san is a sacred, ancient peak that teaches lessons in life to any who climb it; it has done for hundreds of years. The Japanese, in fact, say that everyone should climb the mountain once in their lives. But, in the end, Fuji-san taught me more lessons in denying my victory than by granting it.

I'm still sure to mention, however, that I did it all -every last step- wearing my Converse.

Ian remembers that every journey begins with a single step. Archives

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In this column, the time has come to discuss the business of writing: namely, selling rights. After a piece has completed the three steps from last week, you need to decide its destiny by choosing how you wish to sell it: your choices for this sale revolve around your rights. Rights are complicated, rights are legalese, and rights are extremely, terribly boring.

As such, I had a few ideas for how to make this column a bit more fun. I could write this as it would be, cut and dry, and sprinkle in some knock-knock jokes ("Knock-knock. " "Who's there?" "Someone terribly boring." "Oh, hello, you must be Rights - and you can't even be funny in your own lame joke!"). Maybe I could quote Monty Python sketches at random or just write the whole damn thing in limericks. I have to be honest, though: no matter what I do, this column is going to kind of suck. I might as well just get on with it but, remember, I'm very sorry for this one.

Step 4: Selling your rights (in haiku - because I can)

When writing freelance

your writing is a business:

you might just get screwed.

You must know your rights-

the better to pimp them out-

maximize your cash.

There are two main rights

good for you – bad for buyers:

negotiate hard.

First serial rights:

Magazines take your writing,

Print it- first time ever!

Buyers are not keen

to run writing that's been seen.
They want fresh and new.

These rights can only

be sold once: sell wisely your

piece virginity.

One-Time Rights for you

are stingy; magazines print

your piece once only.

One-Time Rights may be
sold to multiple markets
at once - be greedy!

Some hate one-time rights,
won't buy: your piece better be
some pretty hot shit.

There, that's settled. I hope you enjoyed that, because it took for-fucking-ever. Anyway, there are, of course, many other kinds of rights - like movie rights or the rights to use your piece in electronic form. To cover them all, you really just have to negotiate with the buyer.

There's also the (I think) unfathomable option to sell ALL rights - which is exactly what it sounds like. I never plan on selling this agreement: just imagine how pissed off you would be if your story about Jack and Jill and their adventures on a hilltop became an award-winning movie featuring Viggo Mortensen and Julia Roberts, but the magazine got paid for it instead of you. Remember: your writing is yours, and you need to make sure the editor(s) you're dealing with know exactly what you're selling, and exactly what they can shove up their asses.

And Now, For Something Completely Different: sorry about the boring column content, so here's a bunny with a pancake on its head:

And now a Cat that looks like Jabba The Hutt:

I hope I managed to make a quick discussion on legal creative licensing rights somewhat tolerable. Next week: Query and cover letters!

So, what projects do we have around here? What are we working on? What would we like to get sent in?

And if you see our prestigious editor, Michele, give her some encouragement and make sure she sends something in to a publication that she does not edit. I know you're reading this, Michele: you can't hide from me!

Ian could have done the whole thing in limericks. No, really. Archives

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Freelancing begins with an intricate 1, 2, 3! 1, 2, 3! dance of the following: Writing, Editing, and Identifying Markets. It's a horrible, never-ending tango: much like being forced to dance at your cousin's wedding with that overweight aunt that you hate because she smells like cats and dead flowers (and always pinches your cheeks and gives you lipstick-caked kisses), this tango doesn't end until you've stepped on enough toes to finally call it a day.

Step 1: Writing
I can't help you here. Take a class or read a book, then copy the author's style, but it's not something that can be taught in a book, magazine or blog. Though I can't help you on how to write, I should also mention: it doesn't matter if you think your work sucks. It really, really doesn't, and you should go ahead and put everything you write into the process that I'm outlining here. Even if you don't like it much, someone else may love it, someone else may have the perfect publication for it - but you'll never know until you mail your letters.

Also, you WILL get rejected. It WILL happen, no matter how good you are. And, because it is such an inevitability, go ahead and completely forget about all the editing, all the markets, all the rejection letters, all the crap; while you're writing, just focus on the writing. You'll probably be happier with the end result.

Step 2: Editing
Editing is a tricky business. I find that the best way to start editing is to first let your writing sit. Much like a terrible beer, letting a piece grow old and dusty will help bring out the flaws until they reach up out of the page and pluck a nose hair; it is much, much harder to edit a piece that you have just finished writing because your mind is just too close to it, and you can't view it objectively. If you can, let a piece ferment for about 3 weeks (also much like beer) before you dive in.

I have a painful little system at my desk that I think works pretty well. First, I always work on a hard copy: I find it much easier to see what you're working with when it's not on a screen. I just keep going over and over a page with a pen (the classic color being bright red) taking out words, putting in words, comma here comma there, until I'm tired of looking at it and the carnage looks something like the picture to the right.

The second half of my editing process is something I stole from Douglas Adams , a favorite author of mine. What I do is arrange each page of my story side by side on my wall. When I edit a page, I move it up towards the ceiling; those that I haven't worked with are still down towards the floor. The happier I am with a page, the higher up it goes, and when I've got to retrieve my entire story from the top edge of my wall, my story is ready to mail.

And yes, it does take as long as it sounds like it does. Girlfriends are also notoriously unhappy with the state of their fluttering, New Times Roman double-spaced wall paper, so I use a cork-board and just proof 5 pages at a time (the picture to the right was pages 1-5 earlier today).

Step 3: Finding Markets
A Market is a fancy term for someone-who-will-buy-your-writing. If you use this term, you will prove to everyone around that you are mentally superior, and this will, in turn, make them want to have sex with you. Really.

Finding a market is done almost exclusively through The Writer's Market so, class: open your textbooks and start looking. Keep the specifics of your story in mind while looking for a market. My story, for example, is a retelling of Greek myth to poke fun at modern vanity and the cult of celebrity. It is also dark and features a crazy man starving himself to death, so Turtle Magazine For Preschool Kids on page 569 of The Writer's Market would not be a good choice - my story would not be bought, no matter how good the person on the other end of PO Box 567, Indianapolis, Indiana thinks it is. Instead, I found a magazine who demands "a healthy knowledge of the great works of antiquity and an equally healthy contempt for most of what passes today as culture"; this market sounds perfect for my story.

While looking for markets, keep your eye trained for anything that might potentially be good in the future. For example, I found a college prep magazine that pays pretty well - I'm sure they'd buy an interview with my University's Dean of Admissions, whom I can email and set up an appointment with relative ease.

And that, my friends, is the brutal tango, and it won't end as long as you're trying to make money in the writing game.

So, what stories are you guys working on? Do you have an editing process that works?

Also: "1. Getting very drunk is the best way to deal with rejection. Discuss."

Ian doesn't let rejection by small minded editors bother him. Archives

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Last week I told you a bit about half of my professional writing ventures – namely, being a sports bitch at a local newspaper. This week, I'll begin to go into the other half: freelancing.

While the sports position is certainly a Just For Now Job (also discussed last week; special condolences to Dan, who worked as a security guard for a year – that must have been awful), my dream job is to write for magazines and to write novels and screenplays. The best way to get these jobs is to show up with talent, confidence and a bursting, quality portfolio. And freelancing is the only way to build a portfolio.

A quick etymological tangent: a freelance worker is someone who hires themselves out to a profession where they will work temporarily for people who work full time in the same field. It comes from a name for medieval mercenary knights; these knights would work for any client, general or army that chose to pay them – they were, by trade, "free lances". There, you learned something; that'll be a dollar.

If you want to start getting paid for your columns, opinions, short stories, poems or novels, you absolutely must have a sibling or spouse working in publishing. Barring that, what you really need is a copy of The Writer's Market. They print new editions of this tome every year, but a deluxe edition should easily last two years or more for the beginning freelancer.

Inside The Writer's Market is a listing for every magazine you've ever heard of, and hundreds of others that you haven't, a listing for book publishers for all genre of manuscript and many tips on the legal and professional business of selling words.

In the coming weeks, I'll be documenting exactly what I'll be doing as I prepare to send off my first prospective article. I'll be talking about how to choose potential markets, how to edit, how to sell, what the hell a "First North American Rights" agreement means, and the cold, cruel hands of the mistress Rejection, that heinous bitch.

For the rest of this column I'll give you a prestigious sneak peek at the short story I'll be trying to sell in the coming weeks. Titled Celebrity, it is a retelling of the Greek myth of Narcissus. In my modern version, the story is related by the main character after his own death, and it just gets more interesting from there. Enjoy.

Celebrity

That... man I see now at my feet – lying there, with his head propped up onto the box spring of the bed, his eyes sightless, his mouth slack, drawn – bears no resemblance to the man that you might see, were you to have known us.

You, dear viewer, you would have seen a young man, a strong, charismatic, beautiful man in his late twenties. You might have seen a wicked sense of humor, or flashing smile, a magnetism that fascinated everyone who met him. Ha! You would have been fooled.

You could not have seen through to reality. You could not have seen, just like I did not see until now, the mind behind the sparkling green eyes that was juvenile, pathetic, a grubby-handed child pawing for praise, clamoring for recognition, whoring himself for the attention he knew he deserved.

You could not have seen his furtive glances towards the windows at night, the posturing, the flexing, sucking in his gym-hardened stomach, bleaching his hair to blonde, crooning his pathetic fucking jaw-line, his pointed fucking cleft chin. God how, at last, I loathe that scrubbed complexion. I would murder a child for a scar on that pretty face, a pimple on that perfect nose.

I can’t believe what I once thought mattered.

Well, yes, I am angry. I’m bloody furious! Imagine yourself, waking with a start in the middle of the night, feeling disembodied, out of place...then discovering that you are, in fact, disembodied. That you, as one dead fucking person, are, in fact, out of place in this world of the living. That your hands are nonexistent at worst, spectrally dodgy at best! Hands that earned your money, that combed your white locks, that framed your infernal mental movies are now a hint of a whisper on a breeze, and just as useful.

Imagine how angry you would be, discovering in the ass-crack of night that you are standing over your own twisted corpse.

Of course I’m angry. But now, in this moment of confession, this generous moment of reflection granted me by who-knows-who, I can also admit: I am also excruciatingly sad, heartbreakingly disappointed... in my self, in my life, in this world, in this end... in everything.

So now here it is for you, simply stated: I, Dante Giordano, am dead. I am standing in my room in my small flat in Clapham, looking down at my own broken corpse. I am being allowed to stay here: here in this realm called Earth, here in this place called London, for as long as it takes for me to tell my story. My story as far back in my family’s history as I know through to the end of my miserable life. To tell that story, in its honest entirety, to you.

Ian thinks he looks pretty when he looks in the mirror. Archives

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Everyone has had a "just for now" job. If you haven't had one, you will have one; if you haven't ever and won't ever have one, we, the people of Earth, would like to say that we despise you.

By Just For Now Job, I mean, of course, the position of secretary/waiter/librarian assistant/delivery driver/bitch that we, as members of the working class, drag ourselves to every day to pay the bills. We put up with these shitty, temporary positions as the bitches of society to make money, make connections, or make a resume in the hope that one day we will finally become the Doctor, Lawyer, Fireman, Ballerina, Astronaut, Queen-Of-Everything or Bionic Mercenary (that one's mine) that we have always wanted to be. We put up with the bitch-work of now in the hope that, when we get where we're going, we can treat other people like the bitches.

My JFN Job is working at the local newspaper in my college town. I work in the sports section, which is ironic because anyone who knows me knows how I hate sports. American Football is one of my Least Favorite Things EverTM, and Baseball and Basketball aren't personally held in much higher esteem. Still, I spend a lot of time working with the lowest minutia of these sports (and others) because that's what I'm paid to write by people who want to read such things. Such is the existence of a part-time professional bitch.

It's not all bad, of course. For one thing, the guys I work with a endless fun; for example, they have a game where they find the Out Of Context Quote of the Night and share it with the rest of us. The game goes like this: coaches never shut up, and will talk endlessly in sports jargon and euphemism about their team, strategy and sport. When taken out of context, these diatribes make for some favorites which are oft-quoted at the office, such as:

* The basketball coach who is STILL trying to perfect his offense "spreading wide and thrusting through" the other team.
* The sultry female volleyball coach who, when asked about the importance of a
recent semi-finals win, said "oh, it's SOoooo HUUUUUGE". This one was delivered in person on a tape recorder and was played back at random moments in the office for about a week.
* The coach of a girls' gymnastics team at a school reputed to be full of lesbians describing their successful championship run as "a magic carpet ride".

But Master, you might say (hey, it's my column, I can make you say anything I want), Master - I love sports! Writing about sports would be a dream job for me. How can this possibly be a Just For Now Job?

Well, little Timmy, let me explain -exactly- what it is that I do. When I'm at parties hitting on girls, "writing at the [newspaper]" is plenty specific, but, to you, I promised honesty, so here it is:

I walk in at 8:30 with the fast food greasy meal of my choice, and sit down at a desk used by someone else for the majority of the day. I watch whatever sporting event is on the overhead TV, eat, and read articles and peruse the internet. When my phone rings, it is the coach of a local high school volleyball, football or basketball team. I get the names of the kids and their personal scoring contributions, a quick quote about how we "played a good game with a lot of hustle, next week we're going to work on the cohesive forward pressure of a dynamic offensive movement" and that's it.

I write this story into a 150 word blurb that will only be read by the mothers of the kids mentioned, and even then only to check that I spelled their angel's name "Jazzmynee" as it should be, not "Jasmine" like some common stripper. I will write many of these (sometimes as many as 20) in a night, and all of them are due up on the server by midnight. Most of the time I don't get a by-line (simply "Staff Reports") unless I go out and cover a big event in person. I am also, in the interest of full disclosure, paid $45 for three hours' work, no matter how much (or little) I happen to do that night.

High school sports coverage in small towns in Texas. That's my Just For Now Job. It could be worse but it could be much, much better. And, aside from freelance work, it's my first professional connection to writing for a living. So I put up with it, because, hey, it's just for now.

So, tell me: what are your Just For Now Jobs, and how long have they been Just For Now? Oh and kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? If anyone else wanted be a Bionic Mercenary, let me know. We'll start a Yahoo! club.

Ian doesn't own a fedora, but he does have a press pass. Archives

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Please welcome our newest writer, Ian. He'll be here every other Tuesday unless we can bribe/coerce/blackmail him to write weekly.

Being a college student, in case you've never been one, is actually kind of scary. In between the drinking games and the hot girls who won't have sex with you, there's also a culture telling you to become something, saying that you must succeed. Coupled with a warm, comfortable blanket provided by faculty who tell you that you are going to succeed, one can only assume that you really can turn the world on it's head- that you. Are. The next big thing. So what are we to think, really, when we work at part-time jobs that are short on the glory and worse on the cash?

"Are you all caught up?" My editor calls over from two cubicles down.

"Um, no, not really," I say, still typing a story on a local high school that just won the district volleyball championship.

"Comin' your way!" he says happily, the gleeful sadist.

*Ring-ring*

"Sports, this is Ian," I answer the phone and open a new Word document. "Score?...ok. Who was home?" It's one of the area basketball coaches, and she wants more news coverage of her team.

"FUCK!" the editor yells. Startled, I look up.

"What?!"

"Goddamn Edmonton just scored on the Stars again. You fucking SUCK, Turco!" The other sports writers, seated at desks all around me, laugh quietly.

"Oh."

"And hurry up with that, the Morning-News is crawling up my ass asking about when they're gonna to get it," he says, turning back to his computer. Shit. I start typing again, my part-time job on it's usual nightly course.

See, they say we're all special, but the reality is ... we're not. At least, 99% of us can't possibly be: we have to make way for the 1% who are. And so, all of us who didn't have lightening strike or didn't have rich and powerful parents set about creating the best life for ourselves that we know how. We pick a profession of service, power or money, then focus our academic might on the major that will give us the know-how and training to throw ourselves into that profession.

And, well, that's how I became a word whore. With one stop at Barnes & Nobles, I walked out with the 2006 edition of The Writers Market and the self-applied title of Professional Freelance Journalist; it's telling of my profession that the only requirement for entry is $26.99 plus tax, but there you have it. It's a big clubhouse - just hand the doorman your cash and you can come inside. We're a little like pyramid schemes that way.

So I had the book. I had the grammar skills and vocabulary. I had the wit. I had all the tools to write, but then I slammed nose-first into a solid steel wall: I had no credentials, no previous work, no proven track record - I didn't have anything I needed to get published. Published?! Where the fuck did this come from? I had been assured that if I could write well, the words would get out to the world. What the hell is this publishing game, and how do I play it?

It was with all of these thoughts in my head that I found myself behind a desk in the sports section of my local paper, cutting my teeth on AP Style, being a reporter, deadlines and the special brand of chaos that is only found in newsrooms. And sure, I am happy with my part time job, earning money and still going to college. I don't get paid much, but I'm getting paid to write, and that's a fantasy I've had since I was 12 or so. In fact, the "getting a paycheck for writing" fantasy actually used to mentally fight it out with the "Elizabeth Hurley in a vat of Jell-O" fantasy during my high school years. Yeah, I was a complicated teenager.

But, true story, Word Whores can't be choosers. If you have a by-line for a writer, I want to be that writer. Need an article about the reproductive cycle of a Harp Seal? I. Don't. Give a shit. I'll learn all about it and then write it for you, just give me the damn by-line. No, come on, give me the by-line, man, don't bogart that shit. It's been so long since my last check. I can write a book like I say I will, I can write that book, like, any time I want to, I just need one more column to get me going!

Seriously though, it is my hope that this space will document my journey from nameless journalism major to published writer, successful columnist, best-selling novelist, award-winning screenwriter, or whatever else life has in store for me. Hell, I'd be happy if it was just Has-Proud-Parents-And-A-Paycheck Guy.

And I know I'm not alone - wannnabe writer is one of the most common job descriptions in America today. So many people want to be published but aren't, but can't find time to write, but can't get their work noticed. I don't have the answers; I wish I did. But, I promise, this column will be an honest, accurate portrayal of my attempts, successful or not.

I also have the habit of talking about politics, sports, theology, people, and the meaning of life (42). So, be warned, if you're going to walk around in here, you're gonna to get some of that stuff on your shoes. Sorry about that.

Hello, world.

Ian once killed a man in Reno in a fight over a box score.

Bio

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