Archive for the ‘ Writing Life ’ Category

Wait, Who Am I Today?

Mystery-PersonOne of the interesting things about doing a lot of commercial writing is that you can amass an enormous portfolio without ever getting a byline.

That’s not to say my name’s not on anything out there — if you Google around a bit, you’ll find plenty of “Geoffrey Cubbage” writings, all the way back a couple of articles I wrote for a roleplaying magazine in high school — but for the most part I am an anonymous contributor.

All well and good, so long as you don’t feel the need for artistic fulfillment. I would rather have my name on a paycheck than an article, generally speaking, so being the faceless voice behind websites suits me just fine as long as the money keeps rolling in.

But it does raise the interesting problem that somewhere, at some point along the line, you have to have a named account, just to get into the backstage of a website and muck around, and a lot of the time it has to be one based on your real name or e-mail address if you want to get paid.

I have lots of those now. I think my current count is up to eight, in fact, about half of which are some variation on my first and last name.

And yes, they all have different passwords.

It’s getting to the point where poor Google Chrome can’t even keep track of who I am on any given day. Big-G Geoffrey? Little-g geoffrey? Gcubbage, cubbageg; Geoffrey Cubbage? All different writers for different employers and websites.

The predictable result is mis-posting. I’ve mostly managed to avoid it, but I did briefly end up — on this account, the one that I use for MA101 — as an admin on a website selling erotic fantasy e-books. Whoops.

Not that there’s anything wrong with selling erotic fantasy e-books. I mean, there’s a reason I was getting an admin account there, folks. But I wear a different hat for that one, mostly because the payment route is slightly different and I gotta do what I can to keep this stuff straight. The IRS is already unhappy with me this year (the feeling is mutual).

So who am I, again, today? Whoever it is, don’t worry if you don’t like him. I can be someone else in a minute.

2013
05/21
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
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Freelance Milestones: Getting to Say “No”

Whenever things go slow around here it’s usually a good sign — unless they go slowly for, like, a week with no vacation notice or anything, in which case you should probably start worrying that I’m dead in a ditch somwhere.

But mostly when I miss a day here or there it means I’m getting paid to write so much that I don’t have time to bang something out for MA101, which yay. Money good.

(Missing deadlines, even minor ones, not so good, but y’all aren’t paying me to be prompt here. Sorry.)

So anyway, as it happens, that impressive amount of work that kept me busy all day yesterday and is keeping me hopping today is actually enough that I turned down a job today.

It’s one of those milestones you don’t realize you’re nearing until you trip over it.

Now, I have turned down jobs before, or at least not worked very hard to get ones I wasn’t all that interested in to begin with, but that’s mostly been a personal preference and sanity-maintaining things. If something looks like it’s really going to suck, I tend not to apply for it. What’s the point in working for yourself if you’re going to do shitty jobs for money, right?

But this week I got offered something that probably would  have been pretty fun to do, was within my skill set, and would have paid a decent amount, although not as much as I wanted for it.

So I said no.

And I’m a little sad about that. It was a decent job. But the reality is right now that I don’t have time to add more work unless someone is paying me above and beyond what my current clients do.

And that’s kind of a cool milestone, even if it’s a shame I couldn’t take the job. It’s very “woah, I’m a professional now.”

Which, if you’re using the phrase “woah, I’m a professional now,” you’re not. But still.

It’s a bummer to have to disappoint people. But it’s very cool to need to because my skills are in so much demand.

So, uh, sorry dude. Maybe next time?

2013
05/03
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
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Write for Your Living; Never Worry about “Motivation” Again

snoopy-writingIf you read a lot of writer’s blogs, you’ll see a lot of motivation techniques.

Free-associations, writing sprints, character exchanges, blogging itself — everyone’s got suggestions for how you can get your butt into that chair and start putting actual words on actual paper.*

I have a modest one of my own: write for your living, and if at all possible owe a lot of people a lot of money.

Turns out the IRS would like quite a bit of money from me this year. (It probably isn’t actually that much more than people with paychecks are paying out of those, but there is a bit of an insult to injury factor when they tell you your “effective tax rate” is a little over 5% and then ask for 18% of the money you made last year.)

That, combined with the usual factors of rent, food, and the miserable pittance of coverage that passes for private health insurance has been more than enough to keep my butt glued to this chair, I assure you!

There are, of course, some flaws with this plan. You have to at least plausibly be able to make ends meet before you try it, and that usually means three or four income streams at minimum, so that you’re covered when one suddenly dries up. That takes time to build. There’s a reason nearly every writer goes through a “day job” period, prior to the terrifying “quit the day job” period (unless they’re being supported by someone else, which is nice if you can get it but a bit of a blow to both pride and credibility).

But once you can give it a shot, it’s very effective motivation, I assure you. A writer who doesn’t write doesn’t eat.

Now if you’ll excuse me, the IRS would like me to bang out another 3,000 paid words this afternoon…

–

*Not actually. But “words on screen” sounds stupid. It’s going to take another generation of writers before we stop referring to “paper” as the default medium.

2013
04/15
CATEGORY
Writing Life
3 comments

Overthinking the “Movie Tie-In Edition” Book Cover Phenomenon

cloud-atlas-book-cover-movie-posterIt’s no secret on this blog that I’m awfully vain about the covers of books I read, so perhaps it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I dislike movie posters used as book covers.

I hadn’t really though about the dislike until the last couple days, when I was working my way through a library copy of Cloud Atlas that sported the movie poster on its cover (the “movie tie-in edition,” in the industry jargon).

My first reaction was to chide myself for shameless hipsterism – nah, man, I’ve never seen the movie; I’m just reading the book on friends’ recommendations – and I’m probably guilty of such. But on closer reflection, there are actually a couple of things that I think are genuinely dislikable about movie tie-in covers:

Number one is that it’s common, almost to the point of universality. If your book gets made into a movie, someone is probably going to do a reprint with the movie poster as the book cover. There are exceptions, but they’re rare. That implies both that consumers are more likely to read a book once it’s made into a movie (which is probably true, but disheartening), and that interested consumers would be unable to recognize a book that shares its title with a movie unless the book cover is also recognizably associated with the movie (which is insulting).]

Number two is pure design aesthetics. Movie posters are big and displayed on the sides of buildings; books are small and sit on tables in homes. The result when you scrunch one down onto the other tends to be visually busy to the point of garishness. For lack of a better word, they look loud. Carrying one around can ruin a perfectly good outfit.

(Yes, I’m vain enough to care about my book matching my outfit. Have you read this blog?)

And number three is the oddity of the back covers. I don’t have a lot of movie tie-in edition novels handy, but the ones I do have (including Cloud Atlas, which went back to the library yesterday but which I snapped a couple pictures of first) all replace even the short back cover summary with promotional blurbs:

IMG_1365

For those too lazy to increase the size (you can click on pretty much all the images on my blog to enlarge them, if you didn’t know that already), there’s a New York Times Book Review blurb, followed by a short descriptive paragraph, followed by three more blurbs. Pretty standard, except that the descriptive paragraph is more fluff rather than any information about the book itself:

A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, and Philip K. Dick. The result is a brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

Now, there’s no law saying that back covers (or inside flaps, in the case of hardcovers) have to feature plot summaries, or that those summaries have to contain meaningful information about the book itself rather than flattering comparisons between the author and other writers. Lots of books that aren’t movie tie-in editions go a similar route. But it seems the norm for movie tie-ins, especially recent ones, which suggests that publishers are getting more reliant on consumers having previous knowledge of the book through the movie, not less.

And at the end of the day, if your strategy for selling books is to appeal to people’s love of movies, you’re not really selling books anymore. You’re selling merchandising with page numbers.

As one of my ladyfriends asked me, just what does it say that we always see books re-released with the poster from the movie version on the cover, but that we never see a movie poster based on a book’s first edition cover?

2013
04/03
CATEGORY
Thoughts & Musings
Writing Life
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Learn to Use MS Word; Make $1000 an Hour!

Ha ha, just kidding; this has not become a spammy, virus-laden website that will infect your computer while trying to sell you a $17 e-book explaining where you can buy our $47 e-books, or, for just $13 more, have them mailed to your home in convenient binder format!

Though I could probably make more money doing that, now that I think about it.

But no. This is just a post about professional skills occasionally coming in handy.

ms-word-logoI take work from time to time putting together “executive reports,” a term cunningly designed to disguise absolutely any topic as a snooze-fest, no matter how interesting the actual subject matter may be. This is a cost-saving method for organizations, since it prevents people who don’t really need to be involved with the project from reading about it and sticking their oar in.

As part of the disguise, these “executive reports” must be formatted using parts of Microsoft Word that the casual user never even sees. Headers, tables of contents, hyperlinks, cover pages, interactive graphics — everything you can think of that screams “this will be printed on glossy paper and stuck in a three-ring binder.” If it’s frumpy, it goes in there somewhere.

None of that is fun.

Seriously, it is not fun. MS Word is a bloated, stinking carcass of a program, buzzing with flies and animated helpers (ha, no, just kidding; they got rid of Clippy years ago, but you can’t write about MS Word without making fun of Clippy if you want to stay in the Snarky Blogger’s Union). But even without Clippy it takes a frustrating while to figure out the right magic words to conjure a professional-looking format with.

clippy-microsoft-wordShould you ever be asked to do that sort of formatting, budget some time for it. Googles will be searched. Help menus will be unhelpful. You will feel stupid.

All that said, the last time I went through and made sure all the formatting was correct and in line with the contracting company’s standards, I was the only one of the contracted writers to do so. Everyone else just sent in plain text. And my gracious and grateful editor (who is an absolute dream to work for and sends me the best jobs) passed along the $250 they were going to pay her for editing and formatting everything, because she’s just that awesome.

Looking back, it probably took me about fifteen minutes to turn my plain text into a formatted report. Multiply what I got paid by the time it took and you get a wage of, yes, $1000 an hour.

Which I only made for those fifteen minutes, of course, but it sure sounds awesome. And did I pat myself on the back for, as my father has told me to all my life, doing “the job I was asked to and then one thing more,” and add the bonus to my savings investment like a responsible adult?

God, no. I bought awesome new boots. I’m not that mature.

These boots.

These boots.

But it was worth the time it took to learn the ins and outs of Word and do a little “design” work as well as the writing. We can’t afford to be one-trick ponies. Take some time to play with MS Word if you never have — learn how to format the headers and insert charts and all that good stuff. Some day, someone will pay you lots of money to take care of that shit for them, because they don’t want to.

And you won’t want to either, but you’ll do it anyway, because $1000 an hour. ‘Nuff said.

2013
03/25
CATEGORY
Writing Life
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Remember the Lurkers

official-lurker-hatOne of the oddest things about being a writer is realizing that people actually read your work.

It doesn’t come through all that much on a blog, even a very wide-reaching one (which this isn’t). Your comment thread, if you’re fool enough to read it, is doing well if it represents even 1% of your readers.

Most people don’t let on they’re reading.

But every now and again you see odd little ripple effects. When I posted something about the Duolingo language learning app a couple weeks ago, three or four new friend requests appeared over the next couple days (I’m beating all of them). At the recent St. Patrick’s Day party, several people mentioned things I’d written about.

And yes, I still get jokes about my career as a sex toy tester.

All of which is very promising should I actually attempt to, you know, sell you guys a product or something. Which I haven’t done, because most of my writing is paid for up front by editors or publishers who have their own platforms, and therefore don’t need (or even want) me selling it under my own name.

But in theory y’all would buy my books or whatever…right?

2013
03/22
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
8 comments

1099-MISC Sticker Shock

1099-MISC-instructions2012 was my first year as an honest-to-god, quit-the-day-job kind of writer.

The year before that I made more money as a writer than I did at my day job, which is part of what prompted the switch, but in some ways it still hasn’t sunk in to me that this is it — the writing income is all the income.

But I’ve rounded up the last of my 1099-MISCs for 2012 now (basically a freelancer’s W-2s), and adding it all up was something of a “holy crap I have a career” moment.

Also a bit of a “time to rein the expenses in there, boyo” moment, since I still feel broke most of the time but am apparently not, but let’s not dwell on the negatives here. It was a big, beautiful, joyous sticker shock.

This is apparently a thing I can make a living at.

Are there changes to be made? Absolutely, both in the way I make money (more income streams, please) and in the way I spend it (no, you don’t need to buy five McDoubles for a midnight snack, and I don’t care if they’re only $1 each).

And the tax bill — now that I know the principal I’ll be using to figure it — is going to be brutal. The IRS is not kind to freelancers.

But those are things that can be dealt with. And in the meantime it’s nice to know that I’m making a living, and not even a bad one at that, working on my own schedule and from my own home. There’s people doing crappy nine-to-five office jobs for salaries not that dissimilar to mine.

So…woo.

Enjoy this moment of elation before I start figuring the taxes, and this blog takes a turn for the darker. I fully expect to be muttering about flying airplanes into buildings by the end of the month. On the bright side, tax-induced alcoholism means my beer tab is a deductible expense!

…right?

2013
03/07
CATEGORY
Writing Life
3 comments

Three Things to Do When You Have to Start Writing (That Aren’t “Start Writing”)

Medieval_writing_deskThe hardest part of the day’s writing is often sitting down and starting it. Case in point, it took until almost 3:00 in the afternoon to sit down and write that first sentence, although the hangover might have something to do that.

But even if you’re not hungover, it’s surprisingly easy to fill your day with things that absolutely have to get done right this second — and that aren’t writing. You’re not avoiding it, really. You’re just too busy. Right?

Sure. And hey, sometimes no harm done. The dishes gotta be done some time. But if you’re making a living off your words, you’ve eventually got to start the “work day.” Here’s three things to do to get you started when it’s not happening naturally on its own:

1. Put On Your Grown-Up Clothes

One of the biggest perks of a writing career is that it’s done from home. You can, and many authors famously do, work in your pajamas, or in nothing at all if your chair is made from kinder, gentler fabric than mine.

Don’t.

Or at least, don’t when you’re struggling to get started. Make yourself behave like an adult going to a job (because that’s what you are) and throw on some decent work attire. Your brain will pick it up as a “time to start working” signal, and next thing you know you will be.

Also, you’ll look nicer for whoever’s coming home to you. Sexy bonus!

2. Exercise for Five Minutes

Exercise is a kick-starter. Lots and lots of it can wear you out, but a short burst triggers more brain activity. 

It’s pretty much a survival reaction that you’re abusing for more mundane purposes — when you break into a sudden sprint or start swinging heavy things around, your brain goes oh, shit, are we in a fight? is a sabertooth tiger about to eat us? and starts working overtime.

Don’t overdo it. Just drop and crank off some push-ups, or run around the block once, and then fall into your chair and start banging away. Cheaper than coffee and better for your figure.

3. Eat a Goddamn Sandwich

That was something my old girlfriend The Doctor used to say when I was being non-functional. It generally worked.

Cooking (and the attendant cleaning) can turn into a time-waster if you’re not careful, so take the instruction literally and actually make a sandwich. One. Some stuff on bread, maybe a sauce from a bottle; slap it all together and go write. You can do the dishes later.

In addition to giving you some needed energy, you’re using habits of thought to your advantage here — we’re trained to associate the end of lunch with resuming work, from our school days on through most jobs. Finishing a sandwich makes your brain expect to get back to work.

Of course, if you try all three of these at once, you’ll find yourself writing in sweaty work clothes covered with food stains…but hey, working from home, right? No one’s there to see you.

Got tips of your own for getting the writerly butt into the writerly chair and starting the day’s work, even on those days when your brain seems to be making up reasons to avoid it? Leave a comment! And while you’re at it, I’d take a decent hangover remedy if anyone knows one…

2013
02/20
CATEGORY
Writing Life
5 comments

When You Screw Up, You Should Apologize. So, Here Goes.

eating-crowLet it never be said that I won’t eat crow when it’s warranted.

We’ve had a great deal of fun over the years at MA101 making fun of other people’s public screw-ups, so it’s only fair that we apologize when we have one here. And here’s the flat truth of it: last week’s attempt at a “Romantic Story Contest” sucked.

No need to sugar the pill there. It was an under-prepared and poorly-executed experiment. The blog needed a deep stock of back-up stories to run if submissions were low (which they were), and I didn’t provide that. The advertising ahead of time to generate both interest and submissions was sporadic. And the stories we did run deserved a kinder and gentler editorial treatment than the fire-and-forget postings they got.

That’s a disappointment. And I’m okay with disappointing results when I experiment with MA101 on my own. We’ve had some flops before, from the “What Can You Build from Three Copies of Infinite Jest?” contest (which I thought was goddamn hilarious and hell with you all) all the way back to the misspelled rollout of the blog itself.

But I should always try very hard to avoid those disappointments and flops when it’s other people’s efforts on the line, and both the two writers who submitted stories to the Romantic Story Contest and the ebook author who generously volunteered custom work as a prize deserved a more active, more engaged publisher than they got in MA101.

So: my sincerest apologies to both Elaine and Javier, who submitted wonderful stories and who will most definitely be getting full marks and prizes from the editorial staff here. I will be in touch with both of you to find out whether you’d prefer some Wisconsin booze or some custom-written erotica, both of which you fully earned. I’m sorry we didn’t have a better line-up of competitors for you! Sometimes it is just the way of things, but it’s still a disappointment, and I apologize.

Space-Station-of-the-Sluts-coverMy apologies also to author A. Vivian Vane, who volunteered to provide the custom porn prize and whose new ebook roll-out (Space Station of the Sluts, available from Smashwords, Lulu, and Amazon Kindle Direct) deserved much more promotion than I was able to give it. One of the nice things about having a blog like this is the ability to give new and upcoming authors a bit of a publicity boost, and I failed to do a good job of that.

(That said, it’s a hilarious little read, so go buy the book, if you like that kind of thing.)

And my readers, of course, deserve an apology too, but at least you get the pleasure of seeing me do a blogging faceplant, which is some entertainment. Right? I’m sorry Romantic Story Week didn’t go better, and I’ll try to make the next few weeks entertaining in compensation.

So that’s how it is. The story week did not go as well as its Scary Story Week predecessor, and most of that was just my lack of attention and effort. There were other projects — good news in any other context, really, since it’s a lot of paid work and new connections that I’m very glad to have — but MA101 suffered as a result of them, and that’s regrettable.

I’ll keep an eye on things as my portfolio of writing jobs expands, and consider scaling MA101 back down to the three-times-weekly schedule it started with if needed, but I’m hoping to avoid that. For right now, apologies for last week and high hopes for this one — we’ll get right back on our (high) horse here at MA101, and hope that you continue to come back for all your daily pointing-and-laughing needs.

- Geoffrey

Seppuku

2013
02/18
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
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Romance Story Week, Day #2: Last Kiss

Today’s Romance Story Contest submission comes from Javier at Crimson Crossing, and my goodness is it NSFW.

Seriously. This one’s explicit. Read it — and enjoy it — in private.

I certainly did.

Read more

2013
02/13
CATEGORY
Writing Life
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