Words are what we wretched writers are. William Gass.
I’m planning to keep this website pared to its essentials: publications as they come out, the occasional link, and a serialized novel or two. I’m currently looking into some self-publishing options for a couple novels, and this will be the place to come for that, too.
Bill Kte’pi, writer of wrongs
I made the mistake today of buying a supermarket hamburger.
Now, I know cooking. I know a lot about cooking. I wouldn’t be surprised if more of my friends and acquaintances think of me as a cook than as a writer. Working at home, coming of age in New Orleans, growing up with a garden instead of individually wrapped packets of carrot confetti, all these things contribute to being good at cooking.
So I normally scorn the tendency of meat departments around here to offer a dozen different kinds of marinade instead of, you know, an actual variety in cuts of meat. Today I went to the supermarket looking for chicken livers, because I loved the fried livers with pepper jelly that I made earlier in the week. Didn’t see them. Asked at the counter. They were out. Asked about skirt steak. They don’t carry it anymore. Well, at this point I had taken up enough of their time that I felt I had to get something — which is silly, but nevermind — so I bought two of the bacon-cheddar pre-made hamburgers at $4.99 a pound.
I make a lot of burgers. I cook mostly on cast-iron, and that’s perfect for burgers, which as many burger bloggers and burger bookwriters have noted in the last couple years, are best griddled, not grilled. Cooking on a hot flat surface gives you a good sear and a crust, maximizing the Maillard reactions and getting the most flavor out of the beef.
So I got home, preheated one of the little cast-iron pans, put one of the patties on it …
… and the kitchen was silent.
No sputtering fat and juice. No sizzle. No sound at all. I actually thought I might have turned on the wrong burner. But no, it was cooking. When I flipped it, the “sear” had a weird look to it, the way meatballs do after you’ve rolled them in flour and browned them. This seemed to fit with the fact that when I picked up the thin uncooked patty, it didn’t sag or risk breaking at all — it was as inflexible as a hockey puck.
So I looked at the ingredients, and the problem was evident right away. This bacon-cheddar burger had more than half a dozen ingredients, of which bacon was the last. Bacon being last is fine if beef and cheese are the only two things in front of it, but there’s more potato starch in this alleged burger than bacon. Potato starch!
What resulted had snap like a Slim Jim, a hot dog saltiness, and a firm texture like meat loaf. Whether or not you think that sounds appealing, it’s nothing like a hamburger.
The other patty will probably be chopped into bits and tossed into an omelette. It’s not terrible, it’s just … nothing like a hamburger.
Two things well worth noting:
My favorite webcomic, Garfield Minus Garfield, is coming out in paperback.
The blueberry Aviation: Fill a jar with wild blueberries and Luxardo maraschino liqueur. Let sit for at least a few days. Shake, with ice, 2 oz gin, 1 oz key lime juice, 1 oz blueberry maraschino. Repeat as desired.
I won’t work for free anymore. I haven’t for a long time, but I’m saying, officially, here: I won’t work for free.
Like most writers, I guess like every writer, for a long long time most of the things I published, I wasn’t compensated for — or I was paid for in contributors’ copies. Fanzines and very-small-press magazines in high school and college. Websites. Fan fiction. Contributing to friends’ projects. Academic writing, when I was still a graduate student and thought there was a possibility of becoming a professor in the future. “Getting exposure.” Et cetera. (For the record, I’m not aware that “getting exposure” ever benefited me at all, and I’ve been getting it for some eighteen years now.)
I enjoyed writing, I still enjoy writing — more than ever, because like many things, writing is more enjoyable once you’re good at it. It’s like a video game in which making progress unlocks more game options. In the past, I put a value on recognition, on feedback, and on getting an audience, and that acted as compensation in lieu of pay — even in lieu of copies.
But I write for a living now, and I wouldn’t be able to if I wrote for free, even occasionally. However easy the project, it still takes my time and my work, and that’s time and work I’m not putting into something else — namely to work that I write on spec, and I don’t consider spec work to be “for free.” Or to put it another way — sure, I’ll write for free, but I won’t PUBLISH for free.
I don’t have a spouse who pays the bills I can’t cover. I don’t have a day job, medical insurance, or a significant amount of money in savings. When I write, the bills get paid. When I don’t, they don’t. This isn’t easy, and I don’t know many people who live like this.
In every pool of writing I’ve touched my toe to, I’ve been in competition with people willing and able to write for free, and that in itself has made it harder to earn a living. Tons of fiction is published every year — whether in an official venue like a magazine/edited website, or unofficially on someone’s personal site, fanfic archive, blog, or whatever — with no compensation beyond the recognition and the right to call yourself a writer. Some of it’s really good. Tons and tons of erotica is published for free, and I found it essentially impossible to make money in that genre — not just good money, but any money — in no small part, I’m sure, because of the high quality of free labor.
In academic writing, you run into people who have to publish something in order to get or keep a job, which means they’re being compensated for their work even though the compensation doesn’t come from the publisher — and so the publisher provides either no compensation or token compensation (for my chapter of Dear Angela, which took about eighty hours of labor, I received a copy of the $20 book). No one’s being exploited here, or anything like that — these books don’t sell enough for anyone to make a lot of money on them — but I’m not in a position where I gain anything by the simple fact of publication. There’s no one in my life or career to whom I need to prove myself.
In the work for hire situations I find myself in, there are two groups of difficult competition: those who live in other countries where a dollar goes further, and who can therefore severely underbid me but get more out of their pittance than I’d get out of my somewhat-larger-pittance; and the hobbyists who for some reason are dying to do some uncredited copywriting work for far less than minimum wage. I don’t know what the motivation is there, but on one job that I bid low on — let’s say it was $300 for a job on which I had $50 in expenses and couldn’t have spent less than $40 (including the fee for the service that arranged the job, but not including taxes, which as a self-employed contractor I pay at double the rate of someone with an employer) — another person bid the bare-minimum of $50, of which $10 would be consumed by the service’s fee. That’s an enormous discrepancy. In fact, I’ve seen people cancel offerings when there were such huge discrepancies between bids, on the assumption that one extreme or the other had to be entered by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In this case, it’s simply that the $300 bid, mine, was entered by someone who needed to earn money from the transaction — the $50 bid was entered by someone who simply wanted to write, and I guess to be acknowledged for it.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Write for whatever reason you like — do anything for whatever reason you like — but just because other people do it doesn’t mean I will. I straight-up can’t afford to. Doing work for free would constitute a charitable contribution, and I’m not in a financial position that enables me to make many of those, so I’ll continue to reserve them for the same causes I’ve always contributed to when I’ve had a few spare dollars — causes that don’t expect me to be grateful for the opportunity to give them my money, at that.
I’m not interested in having or pleasing fans, earning recognition, gaining exposure, the satisfaction of having an audience, developing contacts, getting valuable experience, or any of the other phrases that amount to “putting in labor for free,” regardless of whether or not the venue is making money from that labor. Like a plumber or a carpenter, I have bills to pay and I’ve chosen a particular line of work as the means by which to pay them. It happens to be a line of work I enjoy very much, but I don’t live in a world, I do not live so cynically in any world, such that my being happy at work somehow makes me less entitled to earn a living from it.
Now, if you agree with that, I’m glad, but the reason I’m saying this at all is because not everyone does. I’ve certainly had some editors imply that I’m not grateful enough to have been chosen by them, and some of those editors don’t seem to be around anymore, or are no longer working directly with the hired help. I’ve had work-for-hire clients expect me to treat their project as my personal labor of love, which can be a charming thing but can also be frustrating or even vaguely offensive in a way I have trouble articulating (you can hire my skill, you can rent my time, but you can’t purchase my passion). And the few times I’ve agreed to a fiction project that didn’t pay, it has fallen through the cracks at some point in the process — maybe because when people don’t pay for, and aren’t paid for, their work, they take it less seriously.
22.
21.
20.
19.
18.
17.
16.
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12.
7.
It was at that age that I was so fond, as girls are, of the phrase “I would rather die.” I had no idea what that meant, of course — we girls of that age, oh we never did. It was drama, and it was my first love, never you, Michael, never you if you’ll forgive me that. All the great people died, after all, all the very very best people, so naturally I wanted to — naturally! It was so sweet, like a perfect berry, cold and trembling and full of wet. I would lay still sometimes, on my bed, testing out the poses I thought I might wish people to see me in at my wake. I would hold my breath for as long as I could, hoping my lips would turn blue, wondering how skin felt different after death, hoping someone would walk into my bedroom and see me, mistake me for dead.
I dreamed last night I was lost, but not trapped — the difference is so much, so much, the difference between sleeping and laying down. They are associated with one another, but they are not the same. People think of being lost, and they think of, I don’t know, they think of having mixed up their roads in a visiting city, and forgetting which way they came — they think of being somewhere they do not know how to leave, and their ignorance keeps them there. But we are lost from birth — we do not know where we are, and must constantly learn it — but certainly would not, could not, try to find our way “back,” because there is nowhere to which to return. Being lost can mean being hidden — like the “lost world” of that book you liked, Michael, and the “lost continent” I see in so many of those magazine stories — the world, the continent, does not forget where it is, and to return elsewhere is not an option — but it is lost all the same.
Being lost is not the same thing as being trapped. Being lost can be — should be — has been for me — the most wonderful, thrilling thing in the world — as we speak of losing ourselves in sex — we say we lose ourselves to God — we become lost in the moment –
You are only trapped if you want to leave.
M.
4.
Castle examined every inch of earth, but there were no holes. However the cat, rat, whatever, had gotten in, it didn’t seem to have been through the garden. The soil was slightly moist, in that way gardens often are, but not loose enough for a hole to disappear itself. There was a garden snake — garter snake? he’d called it both as a kid and couldn’t remember what it was actually called — he found when he turned over one of the flatter rocks, but for one thing, it was in the garden, not the house; and for another, he wasn’t sure a snake could knock over a glass longneck.
3.
I’m lost. I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.
The voice kept ringing in Castle’s head, and what was disconcerting about it was that it sounded different now. It sounded more like Castle’s own inner voice, the way it would if he were just repeating someone’s phone number to himself so he wouldn’t forget it; not like the breathy, moany, almost Kate Bush-ish voice he’d first heard, clearly but distant as if from a nearby room, when he came downstairs to call Dr Williams about The Incident.