Button Tapper

Lately, I’m starting to wonder if, indeed, the world has gone mad. Roman Polanski was finally arrested, after being on the run for my entire lifespan. I wrote a blog about it, over at Black Heart, entitled What the hell is “rape-rape”?, after reading a bizarro comment from Whoopi Goldberg. And, truly, is it just me or are the only people on Polanski’s side the Hollywood types who have likely committed similar “casting couch” versions of rape?

Casting couch rape is still rape.

Similarly, I found the reports that French-Canadian writer Nelly Arcan committed suicide last week to be shocking. I will admit that I am not as familiar with Arcan and her writing as I should be, due to being only semi-literate in French, but I had definitely heard of her work and had recently purchased a translated copy of her first book, Putain, in order to get to know her better. A few people had mentioned her to me as a kind of “French equivalent” to my V for Vixen column. I don’t think that is entirely a fair comparison, not only because she was by far a much more accomplished writer—a novelist who happened to write articles for ICI, rather than a columnist struggling to write her first book—but it’s certainly flattering to me. I feel very saddened by her death, as I never had a chance to meet her personally, nor really get to know her work before she was gone.

It also brings up the important point that despite years of attempts to bridge the gap, there are still very much “two solitudes” here in Quebec, when it comes to French-language versus English-language culture. (I don’t like to say “French” or “English” culture, as I am certainly not “English” in the sense of being from the UK, nor are Quebeckers “French” from France, and I’m sure both sides feel equally annoyed with the comparisons.) Neither side is much interested or invested in what the other is doing, despite attempts to bring them together. Neither side is much interested or invested in what the other is doing, despite attempts to bring them together. It’s one of my biggest problem with Quebec, and it’s a problem that is obviously not easily solved. Especially when you have an idiot like PM Stephen Harper telling the G20 that “Canada has no history of colonialism.” Hello? What history books have you been reading, Mr. Harper?

In short: has the world gone mad? Or is this just the usual order of things, which I only tune into occasionally, to find myself shocked and appalled?

I’ve been aware of the fun-loving work of the Indyish collective for a few years now, and at one point I even performed at their Monthly Mess event—a kind of mash-up of artistic genres, open to all independent artists. Lately their website has been really shaping up as a hub for all things indie (and Indyish!), where they’ve recently posted a link to all their Indyish How-To Guides, which are completely amazing. They cover everything from finding (and keeping!) an intern, getting people to your event without sounding like an annoying PR hack, how to make CDs, release an album, organize a clothing swap… and the list goes on. This is all great advice for the indie artists out there, and will definitely make your life easier. Go read ‘em all right now—or add your own, if you’ve got some advice to share.

In addition to their excellent business advice for independent artists, they’ve also got a neat-o Mix Tapes section to the site, where you can listen to indie artists that have submitted tracks for an old-fashioned “mix tape” experience. This mix tape is digitally streamed, rather than loaded into your cassette deck or boombox, but the concept is the same: a variety of genres, available for your listening pleasure. Click here to rock on over Montreal, or anywhere else in the world!

Blogging has always been fun for me, but I’ve never given it much serious thought. I have always been the type to throw down a few words, and then unleash them on the Internet. This style offers great things in the way of instantaneous feedback as well as blowing off steam, but can definitely go wrong in the TMI and personal privacy departments.

Don Draper (via Glory Fades)

CT Moore has recently been writing about the concepts of transparency and trust on the Internet, and he says in his post What Would Donald Draper Blog? that building your personal brand is not about sharing everything. He notes that Don Draper “wouldn’t talk about his personal life or what he likes doing on the weekend. And he definitely wouldn’t gossip. Neither of these would do anything to help him fill the demand of his audience.” Indeed, being personal or authentic isn’t the same as being transparent. In fact, he argues that Don Draper wouldn’t be transparent at all, because his personality is actually a brand he has built to hide his true identity, Dick Whitman.

So what does this have to do with me, Laura Roberts, the person, or the “brand”? Do I even have a brand? To some extent, yes, I have several. I’m the face of Black Heart Magazine. I’m V for Vixen. But here, on my personal website, I’m Laura Roberts, Writer. And that brand needs developing.

How does one develop a writer brand? By writing, of course. But also by writing about writing. Not to the extent that your writing is overshadowed by talk about the writing process, but enough that it helps you to clarify your own thoughts on that process and how to move through it.

The other day I wrote a blog about How to Get Published. I was tired of people asking me the same old questions, of coming to me for advice that they won’t even take, of pumping me for information that is freely available. But you know what? The fact is, that information is freely available, so what does it matter if they want to get it from me instead of from Google? It’s already free, and it doesn’t damage me in any way to share what is already known and available. In fact, it may even increase the trust people have in my writer brand, so why not do it?

Should I charge for these pearls of wisdom? If I can, yes, that would be great. But if someone asks me for an opinion, or advice, why should I be stingy, or tell them I’m not going to give them the information they’re looking for unless they pay me for my time? The information is already out there. The fact that I will pass it along for free can really only make me look good. It’s something for you, and something for me. No money needs to exchange hands.

Anaïs Nin (via SLGA)

So yes, I can answer your questions about writing. I can share a few “secrets.” And I can keep a few to myself, too. But blogging—and writing in general—is about setting people free and giving everything you’ve got to the page (or the screen). To quote Anaïs Nin:

“To write means to give all. No witholding is possible. The best writers are those who give all. However, there is the choice of clothing: fiction, symbolism, poetry, etc.”

In the end, I subscribe more to the Anaïs Nin school of writing everything and choosing the veils through which things are presented than the Don Draper method of building mysteries from the ground up, though each has its value in different situations. Here, as my writer self, I choose not to withold anything, whether we’re talking about writing, art, sex, life, the universe, or anything else. That authenticity is important, even if transparency isn’t.

Which type of blogger are you: Don Draper or Anaïs Nin… or someone else entirely?

"Moleskine Retro PDA Part4 - Weekly Review" by Flickr user mrmole (part of his "Getting Things Done" set)

How do you get published? How do you get people to pay you money for your writing? These are questions I hear a lot from writers who are new to the game and want to get in it. And I would love to help you new writers, because I’m a nice person who likes to talk about writing, but here’s the first lesson of freelancing and writing in general: you have to find your own work.

I don’t say this to be cruel, but when people ask me general questions about “how to get published,” it seems to me that they haven’t done their research. Writing is a job, like any other, and you must put in the work. This includes research, which means both figuring out what you want to write about, and searching the Internet for places that publish stuff like whatever it is you’re writing. No matter what genre you choose, there are tons of venues out there that will publish your work; that’s a fact. Even if you write about a specific breed of goat, and how to remove its hair and make it into wool that you will knit into the world’s most amazing sweater.

Seriously.

Research, Research and More Research

Get yourself online and start Googling. Get yourself a copy of the Writer’s Market for your genre and start flipping through it until you find what you’re looking for. Please don’t ask me to do the research for you; that’s part of your job.

Now, if you’re asking me something specific, like: “Hey, I wrote an article about a chef friend of mine, and I’ve tried pitching it to X, Y and Z magazines, but they’re not interested. Got any other ideas?” then I will know that you have done the research, have written something you think is great, have been putting your work out there, and are serious about what you’re doing. You’re not just trying to pick my brain for free, to mine tips and tricks that I have learned after years of practice, research, success and failure, putting my work out there, researching online, talking to other writers who are knowledgeable on the subject, reading tons and tons of “how to” books and websites and articles, taking classes (which I paid to learn from!), and otherwise honing my skills.

In short, you cannot pump me or other writers for information and expect them to reveal all their secrets for free. It’s disrespectful and rude. I realize you do not intend to be rude or disrespectful, but let’s face it: writing is an art form, and you wouldn’t ask Picasso to tell you how he did what he did for free, would you?

Writing is also a trade, which means that it involves skills that must be built over the years, so my offering you advice may not even be helpful if you don’t have a certain skill set to begin with. Writers specialize in certain genres. Maybe we are not even talking about the same genre, so my advice will be useless to you.

Ultimately, there is no reason to be ignorant on the subject of writing and publishing. There are so many articles and websites out there that will teach you exactly what you want to know, for free. So go out and find them! It will be much more useful to you than any free advice I could give, and you will become a better writer the more you know about your trade. I can recommend places that have been helpful to me, but maybe you will find great advice from another source. Be curious, always be reading about writing. And then do the work of writing, editing, and sending your work out there for others to read, because in the end, there are only two real rules about how to get published: write well, and keep sending your work to editors until they agree to publish it.

The Writing Success Cheat-Sheet

In case you want to know about the top three places I find helpful on a regular basis, as a kind of cheat-sheet, here’s my list:

• The Writer Magazine – A great magazine (like, in actual paper format, delivered by the post office!) for writers of all genres. Published monthly, you’ll find lots of great tips for everything from how to write in a certain style to how to get your work published to markets you might want to explore. If you subscribe to the magazine, you’ll also get access to web-exclusive articles, which are often geared towards writing for Internet publications, rather than print pubs.
• MediaBistro – While I hate that they advertise Suite101 on their job boards (along with a bunch of not-really-writing jobs for various media companies), they do have a lot of listings here that are reputable and involve high-profile media outlets. You can sign up for free and get tons of newsletters from them, if you so desire, or join their “AvantGuild” membership and get extras like health care coverage (a big plus for Americans), discounts on writing-related services, the ability to post your CV and a media profile on their site, and access to their excellent “How to Pitch” articles that will help you figure out how to pitch to specific media outlets that are particularly challenging. This site is extremely helpful and totally worth the $55 US it costs for a one-year subscription.
• Writers Weekly – Sign up for this e-newsletter and get job postings, writing tips, publishing advice and even free e-book recommendations in your inbox on a weekly basis. The woman who runs the newsletter also runs an e-book publishing company called Book Locker, which publishes books on the subject of writing from every angle imaginable, so you’ll also receive ads for her e-books and quarterly writing contests, which you may find helpful as well.

Here is the text of an email I just sent to Media Job Search Canada, and which I have forwarded to MediaBistro. It can equally well apply to media job boards everywhere that uphold this offensive policy of posting scam “jobs” meant to trick and/or entrap young, inexperienced writers:

Dear Media Job Search Canada,

As a hard-working freelance writer, I’d like to make a suggestion for your media job-posting site: Don’t post ads from “pay-per-click” sites like Suite101!

You recently posted this ad on your site:
http://www.mediajobsearchcanada.com/job_view.asp?jobID=13069

To me, this is not a job. It is insulting to see these types of scam ads on media-friendly, media-focused job boards, as the “pay” depends on the writer’s constantly pimping links to friends, family and random strangers. You are only “paid” when you reach a certain number of views on your articles, and for most writers on the site, places like Suite101 never pay out. Period. How do I know this? I “worked” for them, and have never received a paycheck for any of the articles I wrote for their site.

This is not a job, it is a scam. To post ads from scammers like these demeans all media job-seekers, and suggests that we are not worth paying for our efforts. We ARE worth paying, and I would really like this ad—and others like it—banned from your site.

Sincerely,
Laura Roberts
–
Writer, editor, button tapper
http://buttontapper.com
&
Editor-in-chief, Black Heart Magazine
&
“V for Vixen” @Hour.ca

My fellow writers, please do not apply for these types of “jobs.” They are not jobs, they are scams. Even if you are just starting out, you are a professional writer, and professional writers deserve payment for their work. If you must write on spec or for free in order to achieve clips for your portfolio, do it for a reputable company, one whose work you have read and admire. There are plenty of great magazines that are run by unpaid volunteers, and I would much rather see my friends and fellow freelancers contributing to these types of endeavours than getting scammed by scumbags like Suite101 and their ilk.

Oh, and for the record? Suite101 banned me from their site for being “too creative” with my work. If the fact that they never pay you for your work to begin with isn’t bad enough, the fact that you can’t even write something you’d be proud of should strike you as unbelievably offensive. Quite frankly, I am proud of the fact that they banned me from the site, as it only proves that they are close-minded where creativity is concerned and will never achieve anything beyond stealing writers’ works.

P.S. To clarify, I do respect MediaBistro as an authority on media jobs, which is why I find it puzzling that they, too, are posting “jobs” from people like Suite101. Suite101 is perpetually “seeking writers.” Is it any wonder, given their lack of payment? Also, if you’d like more comments/info on Suite101, WritersWeekly has a forum full of comments and complaints about them here and here.