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.
[This post is getting many many hits from people new to the page, so I’ll just add a short “hi”: I’m a 32 year old professional writer you haven’t heard of, but nothing I write has any real bearing on this post. The oldest parts of the post are the numbered list and the defense of Valentine’s Day. That defense was originally circulated in response to people bitching about other people celebrating the holiday, or about the very existence of the holiday. I don’t care if anyone celebrates it, but I find that bitching loathsome.
The other parts have accumulated around that nucleus, which is why it’s the annual Valentine’s Day post even though its focus is mostly elsewhere.]
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This has appeared many places over the last six years, in a large variety of forms. Its antecedents were message board posts, emails, blog entries, and conversations stretching back to the 90s. When people started requesting a repost or copy of the original thing, I started jotting new notes on the same old crumpled napkin. The current version is an amalgamation of all those things.
These are just things I know. There are other things I don’t know. Don’t go thinking my horse is too high, cause most of this shit was found out the hard way. Some of it I learned from mistakes I made, some from mistakes I saw, some from mistakes made against me.
Substitute pronouns as appropriate.
Click on the thingie for the full post.
Steve Gerber was a profound influence on the way I approach ideas, not to mention one of my favorite writers since I was 8. After Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, he was one of the first comics creators I knew by name.
… but we all find it’s necessary to point these things out sometimes, and what better time than now? I’ve been told that you can substitute “freelancer” or “telecommuter” or other permutations of “people who work at home” for the appearance of “writer” in most of the following.
1: Writers write. If I put work aside every time there was something else to do, nothing would ever get done — not spec, not assignments. This is why I don’t own any video game consoles, The Sims, or that digital cable package that would give me all the Phoenix Suns games (I do watch most of the Red Sox games on NESN, though).
2: If I have time to email you but not to talk on the phone, that’s not some crazy weird mysterious thing — it follows pretty handily: I can jot an email quickly, or respond to a longer one in the inevitable breaks of writing, but a phone call is a monolithic block of time in which I’m doing nothing else, and I can’t tab back and forth from it.
3: Just because I had time to go to a movie in the afternoon one week does not mean I am free all the time forever at the drop of a hat; it means my schedule is not as static as yours. Some days I’m busier than others! It’s such a simple thing that I have no idea how to explain it. It’s like saying “hi, I have feet.” Where do you go from there? I DO have feet. If you don’t understand that, I don’t think it’s my fault.
4: Calling me a workaholic is not going to make me see the light, throw my hands up, and say “well then, I guess I won’t do any more work today.” I’m not a workaholic. I’m someone who sometimes has days when I work until ten or eleven at night, as a way to pay for the days when I go see a movie in the afternoon, read a couple hundred pages of a book, and then work for a few hours on fiction I might or might not someday be paid for.
5: That time when I’m writing fiction, that’s work too. It’s the most flexible time on my schedule, and that makes it the most important, because it can be put off indefinitely, but if it is, everything goes to shit. My work-for-hire jobs exist only and wholly in order to build a lifestyle in which I can write for spec — or even, in the case of my novel The Sun Eater, write for a market I don’t know will ever exist.
6: The fact that I have time to check my email or the internet in general does not mean that I am lying about being busy. If I reply to your email, you have not tricked me into revealing that I’m not as busy as I say I am.
7: The fact that the television is on or I am listening to music does not mean that I am lying about being busy.
8: I don’t get sick days. I don’t get vacation days. I don’t get days where I can kind of phone it in and slack off or stretch three hours of work into eight, and still get the same paycheck. I get paid for effort, not time or the courtesy of showing up. I’m not saying it’s awesome, I’m not saying it’s impressive, I’m not saying I am some demigod of labor and grit, I’m just saying it is what it is.
9: Some careers are lifestyle choices — writing, or freelancing in general, is hardly the only one. Academics have little say in where they live, for instance, and can rarely (and even then, at great inconvenience) take time off other than the regularly scheduled academic breaks. Many people in medical and legal fields are on call, officially or in practice, at off-hours. Transportation workers have strange hours. My brother, among his many other duties, does commercial and home snow-removal in the winter — which can mean working all night with very little notice.
This is just how it is.
Going through movies and adjusting my Netflix queue, I realized — in that way that you internally articulate something you already knew and was obvious, but hadn’t been highlighted — that movies are as much an influence on my writing as music and other stories are, but I take something different from them. Not the plot, usually, though I’ve written a novel that owes a lot to Cool Hand Luke and Rio Bravo. What I take from movies is a tone … almost a color, or a sense of place … a place from which I can imagine writing the story.
They’re not always movies I love, though they often are. And they’re very often movies that don’t have anything to do with what I’m writing. The movies that play the most into what I write?
Carnal Knowledge (if more people watched this movie, Closer wouldn’t be so overrated)
They All Laughed (generally heralded as a disaster, but I love it for some reason)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Wicker Park
Cool Hand Luke
Badlands
Two-Lane Blacktop
Duel
My first fiction publication, a million years ago.
Y’all don’t know how hard it is to google reviews when you can’t spell my name. I have written a pome to help you.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the /e/
and the /p/
Falls the apostrophe
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the /e/
and the /p/
Falls the apostrophe
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the /e/
and the /p/
Falls the apostrophe
For Thine is the kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way my name ends
this is the way my name ends
this is the way my name ends
3.14159