the slack daily

No Free Lunch.

One of the benefits of being an unemployed writer is that people always offer you writing work.  It's rare that a week goes by that I don't field some sort of offer to ghostwrite a book, pen a screenplay, assemble a television pitch or rewrite dialogue.  They've always found me through LinkedIn or MediaMatch or Variety's the Biz.

This week's contestants:

1. Person #1: 

Respectful, returns emails, inquires about my rate, is eager to discuss the project.  

2. Person #2: 

Offers me work on an "exciting project" that happens to be their screenplay. Does not inquire about my rate, tells me "it's all there except the story."  When I discuss payment am simultaneously told that a "writer" should work for "art's sake."  Explain that landlady is not willing to be paid in half-finished screenplays and discuss my hourly and project rate.  Receive an email in return insisting that they can hire the guy who works at the gas station for $5 an hour.   Respond saying that I hope to see him and Union 76 on the Oscar stage next year.

I'll let you guess which offer I receive more frequently.

I've done some writing work for causes I believe in, but that's a case where I've intentionally donated my time in a volunteer effort.  But why do people expect writers (and artists, and web designers, and filmmakers, and bloggers, and etc. etc. etc.) to work as a hired gun for no money?

Do you work for free?

...

Me to Will, last night:

You know what I think one of the secrets is to a healthy relationship?  You hate the same people.

...

Elsewhere around the web:

• I am anti-education. (See the comment on the left, and my response.)
• Will has Things To Do on a Friday Night.
• I can only offer you things to do on a Saturday night: BetheMarriage LIVE! (On Ice!) will be headed your way Saturday night, 9PST.  Check it out at Stickam.
• Tomorrow night The Doctor is In with yours truly.
• When Good Things Happen to Good People:  My friend Tomas' movie The American Mall is almost upon us - and is already in Sears!
• When Good Things, Part Two: TC gets into Moorpark College's Exotic Animal Training Program!
• Piglet reviews our first LiveCast.
• I've got stuff going on over at Antisocial Networking.  No really, go see!

Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

My friend Carla and I always said that once we hit 65, we were retiring to Florida and bagging groceries at adjoining registers at the Piggly-Wiggly.  It was between that and wearing a turban, drinking martinis by the pool and banging the pool boy.

Now that I'm married, so the pool boy scenario is out.  The Piggly Wiggly is still a strong prospect, as is the Slackmistress' Home for Elderly Pit Bulls.  Maybe somewhere in there Will and I will become the couple at the ballpark who shakes their angry fist at those damned kids while gumming our shared bag of peanuts.

Today I had my first eye exam in four years so they insisted on dilating my pupils*.   I forgot my sunglasses, so I had to rock the little old lady sunglasses for the way home.

The Ghost of Christmas Future:

Part Roy Orbison, part Whatever-Happened-to-Baby-Jane?

What kind of old person d'you want to be?

*Check out the email I sent Will from my Blackberry here.  And please use the term "afterboob" at least once today. 

If You're Not on the Internet, Do You Really Exist?

Last night Will and I had the pleasure of meeting up with James, Eden, and Marjorie for dinner and bubbly to toast James' new digs. Partway through the evening Marjorie was lamenting the fact that she had a on of photos to upload to Flickr.  I mean, just because I didn't put it on Flickr doesn't mean it didn't happen! 

I laughed, but agreed.  It hasn't been my intention to post less and less, although I feel like it more and more.  I wonder when I drop off for a couple of days if readers think I'm doing less, which is ludicrous because usually bloggers drop off the landscape because they're doing more.  Because attempting to balance living one's life and recording it is a never-ending teeter-totter, attempting to be both Boswell and Johnson.

I thought about this all this morning as I caught up on the previous week's blogs and ran across Sue Shellenbarger's Wall Street Journal profile of the incredibly-popular Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong.  The article discusses the fact that  Dooce sought therapy to deal with hate mail (she now prints it out and runs it over) and how being a living, breathing commodity has put a huge strain on her marriage and her family.  Shellenbarger writes:

But less obvious is the behind-the-scenes price an at-home mom pays to shoulder her way to prominence in the blogosphere -- giving up her privacy, sustained time off and any remnants of work-family boundaries at all.

This isn't just about Dooce, this is about all of us.  In a technological landscape where privacy is a hot-button topic, I feel like bloggers/Twitters/Social Networkers/Flickrers forget that you don't have to do this.  Your life can still be full and wonderful and meaningful if you don't share it with the Internet.  We choose to do this.  We are our own first defense.  We decide what we share with Internet-Community-at-Large (don't make me say blogsophere!) 

Sure, sometimes the seeds we plant grow relationships and causes and communities. 

But if you chum the waters, don't be surprised if you attract sharks.

That's not to say that hate mail is okay or warranted.  I've received a disproportionate amount for my level of visibility in the blogosphere. (There, I said it! Happy now?)  But if blogging is detrimental to your mental and physical health? The computer does have an off switch.  Use it.

The Slackmistress' Guide to Being Internet Famous.

Exhibit A:

Before Sunday, I had never heard the name Sarah Lacy.  However, after the SXSW keynote on Sunday in which she botched an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (where nerds wielded iPhones like villagers used to wield pitchforks), she's now a well-known name amongst even the non-Digerati.

Exhibit B:

How much do you know about the people that write the movies you watch?   Okay, now how much do you know about doppelganger Diablo Cody?  While her career will always have the O-word -Oscar - attached, I doubt she'll ever be able to escape the S-word.  (Y'know, the one where you take your clothes off and shake it for cash.)

The Answer is Obvious:

I should conduct a train wreck interview with Guy Kawasaki at next years' SXSW.  Naked.

Eternal Questions.

• Why did every kid (well, practically every kid) flip over their Big Wheel to play "Ice Cream Man?"  An upended Big Wheel looks nothing like an ice cream truck.
  

• Why do we complain about popularity contests when the fact is dammit, we all just want to be popular?

• Y'know how they have fight sequences on subways/merry-go-rounds/flying cocoons and one of the fighters is invariably pressed against  the accelerator of the contraption, pushing it to a dangerously high speed limit and endangering the passengers' lives?  If it's always dangerous to go that fast...why build it with the option to go that fast?

• Why are you more popular than me?

• Why doesn't anyone talk about Robert Shea when discussing the Illuminatus! Trilogy?   Everyone just gushes over RAW.   

• Would the world be a better place if we didn't pretend to like people we actually find incredibly annoying?  Doesn't that make us annoying in the process?

• Why am I suddenly wanting a tattoo?

• How did I live so long without Twitter?  I used to slag on it whenever people asked me if I had one; now I can't go three seconds without checking.  Next thing you know I'll be going to Burning Man.

Will is home but hopped up on goofballs, and I'm attending to the pile of laundry/dishes/dog hair that accumulated while I was I was gone, so please bear with us as we attempt to get it back together.  Real updates, a vlog perhaps, and much, much more...tomorrow.