Hey gang, I'm back from vacation and excited to get back to work here on this project. Lots of cool stuff in the works for here, including hopefully some audio and video content soonish. (Not a podcast, don't worry. The world has enough podcasts already.)
I wanted to take a moment and explain why I'm going to be moving away from freelance writing. I've had a pretty good run lately; I was in the print Los Angeles Times a couple weeks back and the print Washington Post last week. (You can always check out my published writing by clicking the My Work tab above.) I know we're all supposed to be too cool to care about print these days but, well, I do care. And I have a couple of heavily-researched pieces coming out in some longer form journals in the next several months, and it looks like I might have a regular column-type thing to indulge my political side. But beyond that, I'm not really interested in freelancing anymore. The truth is that I just find the process so aggravating and dispiriting at this point, and the money so bad, that it's simply not worth it to me.
I just find, at this point, that the process of pitching, composing, shepherding through edits, promoting, and trying to get paid sucks the life out of me. The commercial interests of publications require editors to ask for things that are tied to the news cycle in the most facile way imaginable. I get it, and I don't blame them personally. But I'm opting out. And it's increasingly hard for me to explain to editors what I want a piece to do and say without writing the piece. I'm just really not interested in the "beats" of a piece of nonfiction anymore; the argument, in the sense that people traditionally mean, is just about the least interesting aspect of nonfiction writing. So when asked to reduce my own prospective writing to a series of explicit moves, I'm forced to fixate on the parts that I find least interesting or valuable. What I want is to write in a way that is free of precisely the kind of paint-by-numbers literalism that editors require. Again, not a knock on them. It's just not in my interests anymore.
Meanwhile, the money generally sucks. I am very grateful for the LAT publishing me in their print edition, for example, and I knew what the rate was going in. But writing and editing a thousand-plus word piece for one of the biggest newspapers in the country got me $200. So many younger writers I know think that the higher profile, more established places are where the money is, but often that's not true. Not anymore. And if I don't enjoy it and the money's not good, what's the point?
I also don't have a lot of hills to climb anymore in terms of places I want to be published. At this point even my (many) dogged critics can't really claim that I can't get published in major magazines or newspapers. And it's not like they changed their tune once I did, anyway. I started writing for big pubs in part as a way to prove to my detractors that, contrary to what they said, I could get published in respectable places. When I did, they didn't retract their old insults. They just switched to new ones. So there's little appeal there, at this point.
And, finally, I'm just exhausted by people not reading. I'm just exhausted. The WaPo piece is an expression of 100% straightforward left-wing values; it's a critique of corporations and an endorsement of the idea that only the left can guarantee true freedom. I do write my fair share of left-on-left critiques, but this piece really is not that. It's simply an articulation of basic left principles in a frame designed to make them more appealing to the unconvinced. But the piece has predictably attracted criticism from the left, people insisting that I'm a reactionary even though I'm making a standard left critique of corporate power. Some have claimed that it's a defense of the Google memo writer, when in fact I explicitly justify Google's actions in the very first paragraph. The great bulk of the piece was written six weeks ago, before that memo existed, and that situation is tangential to my larger point. Meanwhile, others saw the headline and immediately assumed that this was a defense of the Charlottesville protesters - which would have been remarkable, given that the piece had come out on Friday, before the event. Either of these misconceptions could have been cleared up simply by reading the piece. But this is, increasingly, a bar that many refuse to clear.
This is a long-winded way of saying that I'm happy to have this outlet, where my audience is small and sympathetic and where I can avoid so many of the headaches involved in professional freelancing. Never say never, obviously, and I'll pop up here and there. But what was always a bad bet has only gotten worse since I started doing this and I just don't really have it in me to continue the slog. I need to focus on academic writing, book projects, and this website. Thanks for coming along.
What precious treasures were lost on previous blog sites that now can no longer be read?! Oh, tragedy, that art should be lost. It's like watching ISIS blow up world heritage sites all over again. If the author did the deletion himself, then his crimes against humanity will surely earn him the unfavorable verdict of history! What a Mongol!