20 November 2013

C.R.E.A.M.

Listening to: Iggy Azalea, “Beat Down.” Yeah it’s really only featuring Iggy and the artist is officially Steve Aoki and Angger Dimas but really, this song is about Iggy. I’m not sure how I missed her on her first turn around, but I’m in on her now though. I have a soft spot for these white female foul mouthed rappers. It’s horrible, I know.

I’m starting to think I should have a work diary. I know I already track way too much stuff, but it seems like a diary for ideas or writing or something would be useful. There’s a few bits from this talk by Maciej Ceglowski, “Thoreau 2.0,” from XOXO that I liked. Sidenote: What is XOXO, is this the new TED?
"The best piece of advice Thoreau ever got was from Emerson, who told him to keep a journal. And Thoreau did, for decades, using it as a personal diary, a record of his botanical and scientific observations, and a kind of staging ground for his serious writing. He would go back and mine it years later for passages to use in his work. I don't think everyone needs to keep a literary journal, but I think it's vital to keep a work diary, for three reasons…”
Anyway, I’m a big proponent of having a work document/diary for jobs, where you can follow along to what the previous person did, but I’ve never applied that to a creative enterprise. Could be time to start. Heck, this blog could be it, right here. All my million dollar ideas for free!

The few times I’ve had a real job before, I’ve always wondered why the people before me weren’t required to do a diary of some sort, to document processes, daily/weekly stumbling blocks, little things they picked up along the way. I always did it for myself, in the hopes of having it for later. It seems natural that you'd want your new employees to have this sort of history. Instead a lot of jobs just throw you in and basically the learning curve is the learning curve. So yeah, work diaries, let’s get on it. And for next year I'm gonna try to do a writing/creative diary. Making 2014 goals already, I'm so ahead of the curve.

A few months ago, a friend put me onto this Tumblr, Who Pays Writers, It’s an awesome resource and aside from learning exactly how paltry the pay for freelancing can be, it’s cool to have actual numbers for what publications pay. Now the people behind Who Pays Writers are putting out an e-magazine: Scratch. I love it already and am gonna subscribe because they do really cool things like being totally transparent, showing us their subscription trend line, and just overall being an amazing resource.
It’s NaNoWriMo time, well, nearing the end. I did it two years ago and I think I finished. Oh wait, yes I did, I was a winner. Woohoo. I should revisit that stuff to see what kind of crap I unloaded into Scrivener. Anyway, I recently read this 2003 interview with NaNoWriMo's head honch or whatnot. I’d been wondering how NaNoWriMo made money and now I know. Short answer: donations and T-shirts. I met an ex-producer of Pawn Stars once and he said that they made most of their money off selling show T-shirts. That's right, branded T-shirts run the world.
"This year we're looking at $35,885 in non-recoupable expenses, and another $24,900 in recoupable costs (like t-shirts). The financing of NaNo has gotten a little more tricky as the costs of the event have grown. Since I don't want to charge an entry fee and I'm dead set against taking ads, we depend on participant contributions (about 70% of the budget) and t-shirt sales (about 30% of the budget) to make ends meet. We have a $10 suggested donation for all participants, and make about $3 in profit per t-shirt (which goes right back into the organization)."
-NaNoWriMo Madness: An Interview with Chris Baty, The Man Behind the Curtain (2003)-
Something I don't get: Why is there no Goodreads for movies? I mean, seriously. (Netflix sort of used to do it before they killed off their social features.) Heck there should be a Goodreads for everything you consume. Is this so difficult? I’ve done some research into Goodreads for books and there's just no good options. If Amazon was willing to drop a couple hundred million for Goodreads, surely there’s at few startup bucks for Goodreads: Movie Edition right? Like I said, free million dollar ideas just pouring out of me. Maybe if Lilly and I can get our act together for fiftyfifty.me, we can take it to NaNoWriMo levels. Dare to dream people. Actually this month is NanoReadMo for me, as I'm so far behind on this year’s allotment of fifty books... My goal the rest of November is to clean up a book a day. Read hard.

Last thing, some book club friends recently told me about American Reader, which I've been sleeping on apparently. It also seems like Brooklyn Quarterly is somewhere up that alley. Try this excellent interview with Wayne Koestenbaum on for size. Where are the RSS readers for these things? I can't read something without RSS. It's a failing of mine. Oh and if you're into Hyperbole and a Half, here's an interesting conversation with Allie Brosh, "Writing, Depression and Learning How to Handle Attention: A Conversation."