Twenty Questions (Process and some Leftover Personals)

Process

1) Amber asks: What environment do you write best in?

I sort of answered this in the last Twenty Questions as a personal question, so now I'm going to answer it as a process question assuming the question is a universal "you:"

(If that's not what you meant, feel free to pop back there.)

Try a lot of places and see what works. Not everyone is going to handle a din of background noise and some people might absolutely hate silence. Some need privacy. Some will like the accountability of a public place. For most writers, there is a pretty powerful need for privacy and quiet. Stephen King calls this "closing the door." And Virginia Woolf calls it "a room of one's own." Of course not everyone can have their own special private room, so you might have to grab a corner of the sewing room or put a desk in your bedroom like I have. Or maybe you use the dining room table after the kids are asleep. My experience is that most writers seem to need a lot of alone time and pop out to libraries and coffee shops to kind of shake things up or because they want a scone.

2) Richard asks: How do you un-clutter the mind when it's full of a thousand nuggets of ideas knocking around, but no way to make it cohere into a *story*?

So this question has a really complicated answer completely unsuited to the quick answers of a 20 Q's. That answer has to do with creativity.

To boil this down to the oversimplified form that will fit into this Pez dispenser wisdom post, sounds like you don't have a story yet. Sounds like those nuggets of ideas are seeds. You need to stick them in the ground and let them germinate. Some will join and combine, but others might shoot runners off and become their own stories.

There are things you can do that are analogous to sun lamps, fertilizer, and playing Brahms at night (things like staring out the window and thinking of your ideas while letting your mind wander...though not TOO far), but you can't really force it, and ideas forced into the containers of stories usually read like they are exactly that. I'd give these nuggets time and work on other things.

3) Alicia asks: Do you have helpful tips for time management and keeping motivated?

You've come to the right place. I am fantastic at time management.

The reason I know this is because I always manage to get things done at the absolute last possible second. If I were bad at time management, I would turn in at least half of my stuff late. Nope. Turns out I procrastinate almost precisely as long as is acceptable and then spring into motion and get it done with exactly zero time to spare.

I hate to sound oracular, but know thyself.

That's my best advice.

If you work well under pressure, enjoy some Stardew Valley and let the deadline encroach. If you hate pressure, make sure you're on that shit right away. If you know you can crank out five good pages in an hour, then you need an hour to do your shit. If you're like me and you write more like a page an hour, you need five hours to do your shit. Know your strengths and your limitations. One of the worst things writers do is assume that they're all going to work roughly the same way, and one of the BEST things they can do is learn their own pulse and rhythm.

I find setting SMART(S) goals is useful for my personal writing whether it's as big as "Get this novel draft done by next October" or as small as a daily blog. Don't leave a project to "whenever." Know what your next step is and when it has to be done. I find I work much better on deadlines––even if they're just my own.

Motivation I'm not so great at. I create it two ways. One is the goals I mentioned above and giving myself deadlines. The other is to cultivate writing as a habit instead of something I feel "motivated" to do. (Kind of like brushing my teeth. I don't really feel motivated to brush my teeth most days, but I just DO it because it's habit.) The payoff is that when I AM feeling motivated, I can go a lot longer, faster, and harder in ways that are not as dirty as that sounds.

4) Kitiara asks: I've been an aspiring epic fantasy writer since I was eight...but i have A.D.D. [attention deficit disorder] and can never seem to write more than scraps. The story is perfectly clear in my mind as much as when I was eight. Its actually more developed now than then...but the problems of putting it on paper are the same. What can I do to keep focused?

I know that not everyone with A.D.D. experiences it in the same way, but I have similar issues and similar issues with my stories. I definitely feel you. Me and ADD couldn't ever get the hang of writing a story. So what I did was I just developed the discipline and habit of writing every day, and when the ADD got the memo that we were going to be sitting there and working, one way or another, and it couldn't get me to go look at the shiny, it started helping me put stories together. However, to. this. DAY. my mind will wander and rebel if I try to just sit down and "write a story," but if I sit down to just write and then kind of nudge it over to the story once the faucet is flowing, that'll work.

1. Confront how much the story is really perfectly clear in your mind. I find it is very common to have a rough outline, two or three scenes that really POP in my mind, a solid beginning, an ending that is going to kick so much ass, and.....some hand waving in the middle. Does that stuff need to be fleshed out a little more?
2. Cultivate that discipline. Folks with ADD have to work twice as hard (or more) to make habit, routine, and discipline replace a good executive function. It will feel like breaking a wild stallion at first––your brain will try EVERYTHING to get you up from what feels like work. But if you just sit down (preferably at the same time every day) you should feel it begin to yield eventually.
3. I spent years doing morning writing and then The Floating Half Hour, and the payoff is that I can just sit down and write almost anywhere and any time. Most writers have a specific time they write. I am more flexible. (Which is good when you nanny for a four year old and have a schedule that changes daily.) 
4. Psssst. Just between you and me..... I'd rather have the ADD. Everyone goes through this process of getting their muse (if you'll pardon that conceit) to play ball instead of just work when it feels good and inspired. Even neurotypical folks can't avoid it, it just might be a little easier for them. And even though I probably had to work harder to get to the point where sitting and writing was a habit, once I DO, I get the advantages afforded to me by my neurodivergence––hyperfocus and divergent thinking (or creativity). Just the sorts of things you'd want to make up stories for hours and hours.

5-7) Amanda asks: When something isn’t coming together as you want, what other activities do you find helpful to your writing? Do you feel short stories are inherent in themselves, never to be expanded on, or do you find sometimes a shorter version of your overall full length to be helpful? Do you, as I do, just go with wherever the story takes you, without a map (read: outline) or is there some form of literary GPS happening?



5- I like walking/hiking a lot. It clears my head, and is slow enough that I can let my mind wander without thinking a lot about where I'm going. I actually have to perpetually remind myself how cathartic and refreshing a good walk can be. My usual modus operandi is to "pedal faster" on work until I'm practically grinding my gears, and while I usually get the work done, it is often with increasingly limited returns.

6- Generally, I find that fiction should be the length it needs to be to tell the story. If a story can be told in 20 pages, making it into a novel will feel dragged out. And unless you're Robert Jordon on Book 10, you don't want none of that. Similarly if you need a quadrilogy to get your story out, making it into a short story will feel train wreck rushed. (Watch a Joss Whedon show after he finds out he's getting cancelled if you don't understand.)

Which is not to say that you couldn't have short stories that live in the same world as a longer work, make enough cuts of superfluous sub-plots to a longer work that it becomes a tight short story, or find a legitimate expansion of a short story into a larger work, but most of the time this is done, it feels a lot like pouring the wrong amount of water into a container. Either you have a pitcher that is practically empty or a glass that's overflowing.

And if you do successfully change the size and shape of a story, you are essentially telling a different story.

7- This is an interesting question given the last one. Are you using "short versions of a long story" to sort of "MacGyver" an outline?

I find outlines to be intensely personal, but some writers will not let go of the fact that their outline is actually hurting their writing. Some writers swear by outlines. Some eschew them aggressively. It's good for certain genres and kind of disastrous for others. Many have a few notes and let their characters do a lot of the driving.

A lot of young writers (young as in new, not necessarily chronological age) know what outlines are SUPPOSED to do, and how they're SUPPOSED to help, and they really cleave to that. They get pissed at me when I suggest that the magical rainbow bridge is closed for repairs and we have to take the long way through the gully, hacking our way through the jungle overgrowth with a machete. But then I find them still standing in the same spot two or three or five or ten years later still waiting for the rainbow magical fucking unicorn bridge to get repaired. They have brilliant, incredible, well structured outlines that they have spent hundreds of hours on, but still haven't written more than a couple of chapters.

Personally, I fall into the later category of very light plot point mapping and lots of character driving even though I rarely have written notes. (They're in my head.) What I have is a long period of percolating thinking about my story that gives me a sense of the milestones I'd like to pass, but how we get there is usually up to my characters (and sometimes has to be abandoned because they aren't feeling it.)

8) Mark asks:  Is all writing writing in the way that, say, all exercise is exercise? Or is some writing worse than not writing at all the way some food is worse for you than skipping dinner. Ergo should we quit the empty calories of Facebook?

Yes. And no. All writing is writing, but not all writing is The Kind of Writing You Want to be Doing™. I think you're more on track with the exercise metaphor. Engaging your language centers with some written communication probably isn't going to hurt. And even though writing "STFU n00b!" is probably not going to help you with that Nobel prize in literature, you aren't likely to find yourself unable to write a sentence that isn't in l33t speak later on that day.

What it might be (and totally is for me) is a waste of time. I HEMORRHAGE time on Facebook and every month or two I have to get my shit together and redouble my efforts to not blow so much time there. When I'm cannibalizing hours that should be for writing, that doesn't help my writing at all.

Also, this might seem like it should go without saying, but it never really does with writers: we get better at what we practice. So if you're a basketball player who keeps going to football practice, don't be to shocked if your basketball game isn't getting any better. And if you're a novelist who spends hours a day on Facebook, don't be too surprised if your fiction game is stagnating while your "argue in impossibly long threads" game is on point.

9) Kara asks: Is 5 minutes of writing as possible better than 1 hour of dedicated sitting and writing?

Unless you're really wasting that hour, probably not. Your brain is not ACTUALLY a computer, and takes a few minutes just to switch gears from whatever its last task was and really get into the writing. I'd say the shortest session that could still be in that sweet-spot of productivity is probably in the neighborhood of 15-20 minutes. That gives you enough time to really get into the writing flow and dig some good stuff out before you have to stop again.

Though five minutes of writing is probably better than zero minutes of writing.

10) Heather asks: Okay so, I have a pen and a notebook (or four notebooks) and what is coming out is a doodle. There's no words. Does that mean I'm not writing yet?

Yep. Or nope. Or um.....you are correct.

You may be starting to fire up the creativity, but it seems like the language centers haven't fully  engaged the warp drive yet. When you start metabolizing that creativity into words, you'll be writing.

11) Joseph asks: What's your strategy for the days where the inner critic won't give you a moment's reprieve?

Oh so you mean the ones ending in Y?

My inner critic pretty much has its name in the opening credits of The Chris Show, and I don't mean a "Special Guest Star" mention right before we open up on a panoramic shot of Lafayette. I'm talking top billing. Most days I sort of feel like at any moment half my patrons are going to realize I'm a complete sham and pull their patronage.

One thing that helps me is to imagine that voice actually has a face. I don't just let it be disembodied and nebulously conceptualized. I put it into words and imagine every single word as spoken by someone I am desperate to prove wrong––usually one of my abusers from the past.

Another thing is to remember that the "inner critic" is the Black Mirror version of my ego. That might seem counter-intuitive at first, but the inner critic doesn't want you to do anything that you're not already great at. Without effort. Without practice. Without work. Just automatically great at.  And once you realize how actually downright arrogant it is to expect to have something great and worthy to say without a tremendous amount of effort, it becomes much easier to just see writing as work.

It's just work.

It's X amount of effort to get idea from head to page. As you get better, that number gets smaller. That's all there is to it. It's not magic, talent, or worthiness. There might be some ineffable qualities (maybe) but the writing itself is a skill.

It's just like going into the office and knowing how much you have to do by the end of the day. You have to think about it, figure out what you want to say, write it, revise it, make it better, polish it, and the whole thing is just a process that all writers have to go through. All that matters is just the amount of work that it takes to get from here to there. It has nothing to do with your value as a human.

Between those two things, I'm usually able to at least sit down and get some writing done.

12) Justin asks: Any methods for organizing non - fiction would be helpful. I have extreme amounts of information and way too many rabbits I end up chasing.

Nonfiction is a very different beast than my usual advice. You're not working with the same elements and you can start with the core idea you're trying to convey and then work outward. (Rather than writing a story first and teasing out themes later.) The process can be dramatically different.

I would, for example, recommend outlining....a lot, and taking copious notes. And not just sitting down to write unless it's just a free write to throw some spaghetti at the wall.

When I was teaching writing at The Learning Center a lot of students would come in with too much information. I likened it to having a whole box of legos and not being sure what to build. So the first thing you need to do is figure out what you want to build––or in your case, write. Once you know you want to build a spaceship, you can get rid of the wheels and the Batman's Mega-Fortress wall pieces.

That blueprint will help you determine what of the "extreme amounts of information" would be useful to help you support the point, and what is a little too much detail or not relevant. Then, if you have some fact or figure that you're dying to tell, you have the whole structure built so you can see where it will fit the best.

In Western academic tradition, this idea is your thesis, and you're going to need to support it with ideas you then prove through evidence (your information) so you would want to think about how it all fits together in this telescoping relationship of claims and support. However there's no reason that all nonfiction has to follow an academic or Western schema, (today's audiences are EXTREMELY receptive to listicles, for example, that have no stated thesis). The exact form you decide on might depend greatly on the audience and medium. Long, erudite papers don't go over well as blogs unless the blogs are known for being scholarly, and your twitter essay is probably not going to end up in The Atlantic.



13) Melissa asks:  I have been wanting to write my life story but have no idea how to put it together as a story and not just as a list of dates and facts... I have looked at books on this subject but there are so many. Just wondering if, by any chance, you have a book you would recommend as a guide for this sort of endeavor.

You know a meta story that is just a list of dates and facts that ends up telling a narrative could be kind of cool. Like a historical timeline or a history book that is actually a story. (Plenty of nerds love exactly this sort of thing.) But let me get back to your question.

First of all, if anyone ("on the streets") asked me this question, I would immediately ask them how much fiction they'd read. I don't know your situation, but that's where my mind would go first. Consider it rhetorical, but important. What you are describing is deeply into the very basics of storytelling–breathing life into a moment. The most hardy way to figure out how to frame stories is not to read about them, but to read the stories themselves. The masters are there. All you have to do is study their techniques and then practice your own. Study how they take a moment in history (dates and facts) and breathe life into those characters through dialogue, action, and prose.

That said, the book you want is called Plot by Ansen Dibell. For the deep foundation-laying trouble you are articulating simply creating a story, this book has no equal.

I would start small. Vignettes and very short stories. Then try to expand yourself outward.


14) Hi Chris! Here's my question (hopefully it's short enough.) You've finished a novel before, right? How did you do it? Did you write it from beginning to end, or did you write a bunch of random scenes and come back later to stitch them all together? 

The questions can be as long as y'all want. It's my answers that I'm trying to keep short. So you do the heavy lifting and I get credit for a "real" post during these nightmare six weeks of teaching summer school and working 80+ hours.

The only time I've shot out ahead to write a scene was when I needed to skip ahead to something I knew I wanted to write to help get me out of the mud where I was spinning my wheels. As soon as I was writing and had opened up and was generating words, I went right back to where I was in my draft and continued the manuscript in the order it would be read.

The problem with patch-working scenes in fiction is that it very much reads like that is exactly what you were trying to do. There are these super strong scenes that pop and they seem kind of scotch taped together with really weak transitions. Characters make strange choices because you've already established they did THIS thing so now you have to shoehorn their behavior to fit where you know they're going to end up. It feels very much like "and then some shit happened that gets us to THIS NEXT SCENE I CARE ABOUT!"

Consider how off the last scene in Harry Potter felt. Even after multiple revisions Rowling couldn't disguise the fact that she had written it over a decade prior.

15) Jessica asks: First off, apologies for the long-windedness, this is a somewhat complex question that's been on my mind for a while.

Writers often give the advice to "read a lot, write a lot". I have little patience for fiction and books in general these days, but I can (and often feel like I do) spend an entire day reading articles, opinion pieces, social media posts etc. I also like to engage with what I read, which can lead to long response posts and exchanges.

My question is: does this kind of reading and writing "count" as honing your skills, i.e. educating yourself on various issues and perspectives? Or does the phrase "read a lot, write a lot" only refer to more "sophisticated" literary activities?

Well, it totally counts. And that "'sophisticated' literary activities" bullshit is the kind of elitist twaddle that makes me want to jam a fish fork––properly, of course––into the eye of the bourgeoisie and their artificial class barriers.

However, it might count most towards writing you aren't that interested in long term.

I've been super excited lately that my fiction bug has returned. (It's been gone since the 2016 election.) Part of it is, of course, because I simply enjoy reading and it's been difficult for me not to be able to focus on that for the last almost two years. Instead I've been reading thirty to fifty articles a day, mostly about politics or social issues (sounds like we have that in common). But lately I've started reading fiction again, not just in these gutting gulps when I had nothing else to do, but in long, luxurious swallows with time I had set aside to read and deliberately by limiting the number of articles I'll read.

But the other part of it is that very likely my writing is about to experience a similar shift. I'll probably start to yearn to write fiction soon and the jerky, horribly forced pace I've been making on my novel will smooth out to a rapid clip.

The point here is all reading and writing "counts," but you are likely to do the kind of writing you are reading a lot of lately. Reading is vital to a writer. If you are reading hours and hours of twitters, you're probably going to start thinking in 280 character chunks. If you read a lot of newspapers, you probably will find yourself writing in passive voice to sound official. If you read deeply into FB comment sections, you probably have a keen sense of social media discourse and will start to frame writing to anticipate pushback.  If you are slamming back articles about fascism like they are Rockstar energy drinks and you want someone at the other end of the table to know how hardcore you are, you will probably find yourself writing a lot of similar rants and articles. Even when we are deeply comfortable with our own writing voice, we tend to be influenced by what we're reading. (One of the reasons it's so important for writers to break out and read something they wouldn't normally from time to time––it gives them some fresh-to-death ideas for how to express themselves.) This is why journalists sound like journalists when they first start writing fiction and tech writers often sound technical. And it's why people who don't read at all can visualize something wonderful that they want to be on paper, but can't find the language to describe what's in their mind's eye.

Can the wrong kind of writing help you in general? Sure, but probably with limited returns. Facebook comment replies will generally help you with the alchemy of turning thoughts into words, but they are NOT going to help you teasing themes out of your settings or making your character portrayals more poignant. If you're dying to be a novelist, you might want to really carve out the time to read fiction and write stories and limit the articles and replying.

There's a question above that's very similar. It probably won't hurt you, but it might not be the best use of your limited time if you're really wanting to get better at one particular type of writing and your attention is being monopolized by another.

16) Steven asks: What ratio is good for hours spent writing to editing?

There's a writer named Marianne Robinson who says she just sat down and wrote Giliad from cover to cover with almost no need for revision. But she had been thinking about it for over a decade before she started working. There's another famous writer who I have tried and failed to Google who says the real magic only begins on the 13th draft. (I keep getting draft picks for the NFL.) If that doesn't give you a pretty wide spread, I'm not sure what will.

I imagine the flow chart you construct for yourself should ask questions like what kind of writing you're doing, what the medium is, and who your audience will be. A blog post listicle and a New Yorker hopeful piece would have two wildly different answers.

Personally, for blogging it's probably about about a 2:1 ratio in favor of writing, and lord knows I should do a bit more. (I'm usually under deadline and time's up.) For fiction it's more like 1:10 in favor of editing. I also spend a lot more time revising and editing things I have a feeling will go viral.

17) Jessica asks: How do I do the thing [writing]?? 

One word at a time.

And as trite as that might sound, it's the damned truth. The best thing you can do–craft or process–is just put one word after another. The minute a writer stops trying to sit down to write a book or the best thing ever or the most perfect short story or whatever and just sits down to WRITE, some real magic starts to happen. Focus on the sentence in front of you, and write the next word. Then the next. Then the next.

And pretty soon you'll be looking back at all those places you wanted to go when you started. And you got to all of them one word at a time.

Leftover Personal Questions

18) Amber: How many hours a day do you spend reading and writing?

Probably somewhere between 8 and 12 all told and probably split sixty-six/thirty-three in favor of reading. Some days it's more. Some days it's less. Days "off" it's more like one or two hours of writing and how much reading I do depends on how busy I am. Sometimes I spend all day in bed reading entire novels in one long session.

I think the biggest misconception most people who want to be writers have is that they will be the one who beats the odds and makes it without working "day job" hours and they are the exception who doesn't need to read voraciously.

The graveyards of would-be writers are littered with their exceptional bones.

19) Michael asks: I know this is considered a rude question, but I'm trying to figure out how feasible my own dreams are. How much do you make?

I'll PM you an exact amount Michael, but for the blog I'm not going to disclose the specifics. Let's say that it's enough that in most of the United States I would be able to just write if I were very, VERY spartan, but not so much that in the Bay Area I don't need a side gig to keep my phone and car running and keep things from getting to austere.

Keep in mind I'm on year six here. And the first year was like $100. And the second year was like $400. And last year at this time (five years into daily blogging) I was making less than $400 a month.

People tend to get downright fucking belligerent with artists if they're not properly starving and barely making ends meet like a good artist should. I've had folks demand free work because "You're doing just fine!" and want me to essentially turn my Facebook page into their free advertsing because "I make less than you do!" And a couple of people have flat out sent me nast-o-grams that they were not going to be donating money to Paypal because I made quite enough already.

That effect is compounded when folks don't realize the cost of living and the OMFG! cost of housing here in the Bay Area. The fact that I rent a room that is how-the-hell-did-you-swing-that? cheap in a two bedroom apartment (with three of us living here) in Lafayette for about the same price that most of the country, outside a dozen cities or so, would be charged for a one bedroom apartment or a little cottage, doesn't really compute for most.

20) Alisha asks: How do you protect your private life from your public writer life now that you're famous? Would you have done something different when starting out in case you became famous? Like, something you regret not doing to keep your private life private.

Okay, but I'm not "famous." I think there are parts of my life that are sort of starting to bend towards maybe "internet celebrity" a little-ish, but even that is pushing it. 

I heard someone describe writer fame once as depending entirely what room you're standing in. In one room, you may be the person everyone knows and in another not one person would even recognize you if you started telling them what you had done. Most people––the VAST majority––have no clue who I am.

It was a great idea to logistically separate my public and private lives (including things like FB accounts and what I'll blog about openly). I did it at a good time (not too late). If I had to do it again, I would not invite people IN to that private circle so casually.

I have given out my trust too quickly to people who were gushing about how much they liked me or were so friendly to my public persona, but who clearly did not really view me as a person. I don't know if I was on a pedestal or they were just projecting things on me, but when I said or did something they didn't like, they didn't turned quickly, fully, and didn't treat me very kindly. I wouldn't say I regret it necessarily (it was a valuable lesson in being wary of that kind of attention even if it kind of feels good at the time), but it certainly stung a bit coming from people I had come to care about. I'm more careful now with who I let in.

Frequently Asked [FACEBOOK] Questions

FAQ for Writing About Writing's Facebook Page but also Tumblr and any other social media sites. 


What's with this blog you post to every day.

That's the whole reason this social media outreach is here at all: to get a few extra eyeballs (and maybe the occasional fan) on that blog....er....this blog. If it weren't for this blog, and the traffic that FB brings this blog, I would hang up all these puns and memes and go enjoy an extra ten or fifteen hours a week doing almost anything else. Fortunately if I can build an audience of a million, a few will click the links I post and maybe I can scrape out a few bucks a month.

"I'd like to become a patron/give you a donation? How can I do that?"

SHWEEEEEEEET!

If you want to be a monthly contributor and get in on a number of reward tiers, please consider becoming a patron of Writing About Writing. Even a dollar a month is enormously helpful and will get you in on the "backchannels" of questions about my work, polls only patrons can respond to about upcoming projects, and solicitations for feedback.

One time donations are of course welcome as well. The conspicuously placed tip jar is over to the top left, or you can use Venmo. My e-mail is chris.brecheen@gmail.com

Technically I can also provide you a P.O. Box if you need one.

And honestly, thank you. I've got rent to pay just like anyone. Financial support helps me keep writing (and running this page) instead of patchworking together pet sitting side gigs to keep the lights on.

"Wait, you want money just for shitposting on some Facebook page?"

Nope, that's not all I do by a long shot. The memes and the puns are just the tip of the iceberg. This blog (the one you're on right now) takes me about thirty to forty hours a week to maintain. I also write fiction–both short and long term projects–and it all goes here for free. Just because you never click on the blog links doesn't mean FB is the only thing I'm doing.

And just so you know, I spend about six or seven hours a week most weeks running this page, so it's kind of a dillhole move to deliberately take time out of your busy schedule to sneer at the idea of someone who is entertaining you asking for maybe a dollar a month from a few generous folks.

Please don't post about politics./Why are you posting about politics?

Writing About Writing has never been apolitical. It never will be apolitical. If you can't cope with that, you might want to find another page to service your "You should be writing" meme and terribad pun needs.

For starters, let's make sure we understand that what you're calling "politics" might split down left and right, but it is really about social issues. I'm not plugging a tax plan or endorsing a candidate or even a party. (I do that on my own FB wall [see below] a BIT more, but I usually still consider that sort of binary thinking a rabbit hole.) But even when I get my polemics on, I'm usually pointing out that a writer has the power to tell stories, that narrative works to create villains out of nuance and desensitize entire cultures to genocide, that media affects culture, that representation matters, that language is used to obfuscate bigotry and oppression, that people get to tell their own stories, and that leaving out whole parts of the story is a pretty good way to control who is seen as angels and who is seen as demons without ever misstating a "fact." I find telling my own story more meaningful than making explicitly didactic demands.

Writing About Writing has always considered the link between social issues, narrative, and language to be valuable to explore for writers and storytellers alike, and won't be stopping this intellectual rigor any time soon–certainly not because some people want their stream of quotes and inspiration porn to never be tainted by an uncomfortable thought of the social consequence that comes with literally aspiring to master both narratives and language.

Further, it isn't really possible for a writer to be completely apolitical. The personal is political and those who find politics sequestered from anything that affects them personally usually have a lot of social advantages. Aggressively avoiding social issues in one's writing belies a strong endorsement of the status quo. There are many writing pages that will stick to making fun of people's grammar in racist and classist ways and post the same hundred quotes over and over. I'm more interested in considering how we can all be vicegerents of the awesome power that comes with being a writer.

And also if you demand that I stop posting about politics obnoxiously enough, I may show you the door. (Since clearly you don't want what I'm cooking.)

Why are you doing transcriptions of the posts?/Why do you often ask for transcriptions?
 
We're creeping up on a million followers and I've been asked if it might be possible to level up our disability access so more people can enjoy. Many macros and memes are pictures of text or text ON pictures. (Things like screen grabs of Tumblr or Twitter, but even just macros.) This means they can't be read and transcribed with text reading software for folks who are visually impaired. A FEW of the better ones can read very plain fonts, but without the picture for context, even this could be meaningless.

Personally I am not going to have time to transcribe some of the longer ones into text and/or I am often posting from my phone or posting from work where transcribing would be very impractical. So if I put "Transcribe?" (or some variation) with an image, it means that if anyone would be willing to do that, I'll cut and paste that text along with my sincere thanks and a shout out and add it to the text.

You can also send it to me through PM if you'd prefer no attribution and the transcription to be anonymous. I'll probably just use the first transcription I see that does a halfway decent description of the picture and text, so no need to keep going if you see someone else has. I'm not trying to slight anyone if I don't use theirs.

Is the free labor of people doing your transcriptions exploitative?

1) Facebook pages don't actually make money. And the FB throttling algorithm was designed by greedy shitgibbons who literally fiddled with the knobs until they found the sweet spot between "That's a lovely outreach you have there. Be shame if something happened to it." and "Fuck it. I'll use G+ and Tumblr!" While I technically might make some Patron money via people from this page, most of them are donating money because they like my blog and my writing, not because I maintain a page that posts memes. (In fact, I often literally say when I post my Patreon something like: "If you're just here for the memes, don't worry about this, but if you like the blog I link to.....") While there is a symbiotic relationship and this page helps me promote my work, there isn't really a mechanic by which this page ITSELF makes me any money.

2) The particulars of transcribed posts are done for the accessibility benefits of folks who use assistive technology. For years there were no such transcriptions. I have been asked to do this, and I WANT to do so, but doing it all myself would be a tremendous addition of labor to what is already several hours a week on top of three jobs I already have. I tried to come up with a compromise to saying "No. I'm sorry. I just can't do that."

3) I'm more than capable of transcribing posts, and often do so (usually over half the time). However when I am flinging up a post quickly on my way to work or posting from my phone with its little stylus, I can't describe some involved four panel comic or essentially type out 250 words. I could just leave it without a transcription–possibly for hours–until I can get to it, but that seems to defeat the purpose, and the alternative is blowing some off.....and not in the good way.

4) I'm not promising people exposure or ground floor opportunities or some slick ass bullshit to folks who help out. (I'm certainly not approaching professional transcribers and guilting them.) If folks help, I assume it is because they want our page to be accessible, not because they think it will benefit them in some way. Everyone is free to help or not help. Sometimes no one steps up and the post just goes un-transcribed until I can get to it. It's not like anyone is being leaned on.

5) If I were making a lot of money, I probably WOULD think about employees rather than volunteers. I pay my guest bloggers, editors, and others who help me unless they insist that their work is a donation, even if it's just a few dollars. However, perhaps the fact that I need three other jobs besides writing will be indicative that I'm maybe not making as much off this page as people seem to think.

The community seems pretty supportive, but please let me know if you'd like me to revisit the question.

Why didn't you respond to my comment?

I am only able to read a fraction (a small fraction) of the comments from a page with over half a million followers. Chances are that I didn't even see it. I occasionally look at the top replies or make sure people are playing nice on a post I know is going to be a tire fire.

I can respond to even fewer. If I tried to stay active in the comments of such a large page, I would quickly find my writing time completely gone.

PM me if it's important or if something is happening for which I may need to wield the banhammer. A good question or thoughtful comment may even go into the blog.

"Will you promote [my thing]?"

If your "thing" is exactly (and I mean EXACTLY) the sort of content I'm usually posting (memes, macros, "you should be writing," quotes, and the occasional really good article about writing, maybe some book love, or a really funny miswritten sign), I might post it if–big if–I like it. I tend to avoid the posts some typical writing pages share a lot of, like ableist inspiration porn or classist (and often racist) prescriptivism. [I'm all for giggling about a misplaced comma, but only so long as we're giggling about what the sign says instead of AT the person who did it. But if you send me something you made that is our usual fare, especially if it's "doin' me a laff,"  I'll consider putting it up along with a link to a page if you want.]

If it's not the normal stuff, but is at least tangentially related to writing, and if you send me a PM asking nicely first I will let you post on our "Guest Posts."  (For the record, Dave M, the following is not acceptable: "Hey bro, you're not going to get your panties in a twist that I posted this on your wall, are ya?") I'll probably say yes. Be advised: web content filler slapped up there usually gets about the three or four clicks it deserves, but I've noticed that the response to quality posts is decent.

Will I do a trade promotion with you? If our pages are comparable, sure. If our pages are wildly differing in terms of traffic, you're basically asking me for free advertising. While I'm down with sidestepping unbridled capitalism (you don't have to pay me money) let's find some other way to make it worth it on my end.

If it is wildly not about writing or it is your own creative writing, or (AND LISTEN CLOSE TO THIS ONE) if it is a publication opportunity that requires payment [whether in the form of a "contest" that requires an entry fee or whatever], the answer will be no.

I have a regular post where you can share your own writing. And if you think a page called Writing About Writing is a good spot for your car detailing business commercial, I don't know what to say.

BTW: If you don't ask and just slap up your self-promotional link into the guest posts, I just remove it, even if it's totally about writing. And if I recognize your name from having pulled the same thing before, I'll ban you.

I'll be really honest with you about my one of my many failings as a flawed human being. I've spent years now building this page up. Don't even get me started on the first year when I was posting to 95% my own friends and like four other people. Or the June in the middle of year two when I whooped inside a Kinkos because I'd passed 1000 followers. This page takes a lot of effort, and even though it's led a few more people to my blog and maybe been responsible for a few donations, it's mostly thankless, unpaid labor where most folks only ever chime in to complain.

I have birthed a tiny little petty in these last few years. I've fed it cottage cheese and bile, taught it the dark side of The Force, and watched it grow up big and strong and it knows force lightning. I cheered it when it force choked the better angels of my nature. I kind of hate how people are crawling out of the woodwork–NOW–and trying to ride my coattails without a thought about reciprocity or so much as a peep asking if it's okay. I really quite enjoy being able to point at something one of my friends did (or someone whose work I've been following with interest) and send lots of eyeballs their way. But I feel really used when people act entitled to it.

If your stuff is self-promotional, I'm going to be harder on it–especially if you don't ask. Darth Petty demands no less.

"Will you read/critique my creative writing?"

I can't. I'm sorry.

There are nearly half a million of you, and this page grows by a thousand followers on a slow day. I'm getting a couple of requests a day to read things--everything from a ten line poem to a short story to a full novel manuscript for content editing. I know you've poured your soul into it and it's dear to your heart. I also know that because you've poured your soul into it and it's dear to your heart, that even for that ten line poem which I could read in a few seconds, you probably want more feedback than just "Nice poem" or something. I know how serious that request is for you and how important it is to you and even how much you may have psyched yourself up before sending it to me.

("Fortune favors the brave, Milton. FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE. LET'S DO THIS THING!!! LEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOY JEEEEEEENKIIIIIIIIINS!!!!!")

But still...as much as I admire your moxie, there's only one of me. A good week for me clocks in around 70 hours between all my jobs. I barely even have time to read and give feedback to my good friends and the folks with whom I have a relationship and rapport.

Of course, if you want to hire me, that's another story (see below).

And then of course you could also do the long con where you get to know me, we develop a relationship. Maybe go out a few times. Have a deep and meaningful relationship. Move in. Experiment with all manner of wildly fulfilling group sex. Get married. Have kids. Join the Columbia Record Club. Start planning for our multi-continent retirement. Then you look at me and say.... "Chris, actually, I really just wanted you to read my stuff."

Will I tutor/edit/do some writing for you?

Sure. My freelance rate is $50 USD/hour. ($75 if you want me to drop everything I'm doing and give you all my writing time right this second). I will need you to pay for your first hour up front, and we'll figure out over e-mail or chat what you need. I can give you a billable hours estimate and a rough timeline for completion, and then I will work whatever is left of our hour, and you can see if my time is worth your money. After that, I'll ask you to pay me for every couple of hours for the first 10 hours or so. As we work longer and longer and build up professional trust, I can give you bigger chunks of time between payments. I'm much better at developmental editing than copy editing

Oh...did you mean for free?

I am interested in buying your page/running ads on your page? Will you sell it/give me admin controls?

Sure! Deposit $50,000 into an account I designate (that's a little less than ten cents per follower--the price may go up if the page grows) and after the money has been verified I will relinquish admin controls. (That's after I walk into my bank, asked for a manager, and made sure that there is no possible way that I'm being scammed and the funds will not disappear.) That's about what it would be worth to me to go build an audience from scratch on another page and might just cover the costs for the time it takes to do so.

I know the bitter, cruel irony here is that no one who sends me these fucking messages will ever read this FAQ. But at least that felt good to write.

Will you sit my pet?
 
If you're in the SF/Bay Area feel free to check out my pricing structure and send me an email (chris.brecheen@gmail.com) to inquire about a date.

If you want me to come to some remote location in the woods to a cabin where you use axes in all of your decorating, I'm sorry. I'm busy that week. Theoretically, I am willing to travel if all of my travel expenses are paid for (including lost income from the other job), but only for people I know. And why anyone would pay so much to have their pets watched is beyond me.

Where can I get some advice about writing.

I need to be on The Office so I can look at the camera.

Here. Here would be a great place to start for advice about writing. Try here. This blog. The whole thing. HERE.

RIGHT HERE!!

Just a FB thumb up.

I'm not sure how people could send a page admin a thumb up accidentally so I suspect what is going on here is people messing with the fact that if I don't reply to every message, FB takes away my "responds frequently" (or whatever the fuck) badge and I have to wander through the wasteland of my own social media feces screaming to the heavens "Why have you forsaken me?" because what even is the world coming to without page admins struggling to be judged by Facebook as "very responsive."

So people send me a thumb up (or "Hi" or "Hey" or "Sup") just because they think I'll reply instantly to keep my "responsive" cred. When FB sends me a $500 check each month that I earn "very responsive," I'll start replying to a message that is just a thumb. Until then, I'll just ignore them.

Hello./Hey there./Hi there./Ho there./What's up?/Can I ask you a question?

I appreciate your decorum if that's what you were going for, but whatever it is you want, please just get to it in your opening message rather than waiting for a reply. There are way too many many of these interactions, and about 99% of them are actually hacked accounts fishing to see who will reply.

Just say whatever it is you want to say (hopefully after having read this FAQ), and I will respond appropriately.

Sending a question to my personal FB mailbox instead of the page's FB mailbox.

It's all just me. You're not going to get your answer any faster or get any better of a response by doing that. Your message will end up in "Filtered Message Requests" which means I won't see it right away. And using that route to be combative sort of feels like showing up to a coworker's house to have an argument about last Tuesday at work. So maybe keep that in mind if you were hoping to get an answer.

I'm particularly fond of the "Thanks for banning me asshole" versions. They're always real measured and unbiased takes on how I've failed to moderate my page in an appropriate way. I might have to make them a blog post some day.

GIANT UNWIELDY WALL OF TEXT

I know we're all writers, but I'm I typically describe my free time in terms of negative numbers. I get 50+ messages a day and unless I want my job to be Message Responder, I am not able to sit and read the ones that demand 5-10 minutes of my time just to read. Particularly by those who conflate loquacious with eloquent. Please get to the point and/or open with one GREAT FUCKING hook because trust that when I see unfathomable huge blocks of mammothian paragraphs, I just assume that it's self important bloviation, with huge tangents about Bukowski or some shit, and delete it unread.

Where can I get that t-shirt/mug/thing I really liked?

Whenever I find something still attached to its original commercial source, I will put it in the OP. If someone knows the source and puts that in the comments, I will edit the OP. But if I don't know and no one out there knows, the only thing I would do is try a reverse image search on Google and start digging through the results, same as anyone else. I'd suggest giving that a try.

Messages sent to me in obvious altered states of consciousness.

Sober up first please.

Okay these aren't exactly questions but they are all too frequent.

Nudes, marriage proposals, raging screeds, strange claims of supernatural forces in my life that only converting to your religion can save me from. I'm not even going to dignify them with a response.

But for FUCK'S sake, when you sober up, the message you should be sending me is "I'm sorry," not "Hey, why didn't you reply to this?"

I was too impersonal.

So this is another one that isn't a question so much as a reaction that has happened a few times. And even though it's "a few times" out of hundreds (maybe thousands), and I should probably trust that the law of large numbers applies, and that it's more about them than me, I worry about this shit.

I know for some people starting a PM is like reaching out personally and it might feel brusque of me to simply reply politely but briefly to the business at hand. Please remember that I'm getting 50+ messages a day I'm trying to be a writer not an email answerer, so I get through my admin stuff as quickly as I can. That means, while I try to be friendly and polite, my responses might be quick and to the point.

If you were hoping to become virtual pen pals, exchange warm replies back and forth for days, maybe buy me a drink the next time you're in the SF Bay area, and perhaps even end up riding Medusa at Discovery Kingdom with our pinkies locked, you should open with that.

WILL I marry you?

I'm pretty sure this was probably meant to be this flattering joke, but just so you know, I've actually hit that point of internet "fame" (or whatever the hell) where I've had some online stalking and some creepy obsessive behavior, so I'm going to be glancing nervously at my block button. Maybe joke about buying me dinner and getting to know me as a person for the effect you were probably going for.

Oh great. I see that you've seen my message but you won't reply. Thanks a whole lot you jerkwad. What is wrong with you?

I hate that people can tell when I've "seen" their chats. I hate it with the white hot fury of a billion supernovas. Because not everything is urgent. And sometimes I triage that shit. And sometimes I triage it right into the ignore pile. And it is a universal constant that the people who send the most ignorable messages are also the ones who think they are absolutely the most important people in the universe and get bent out of shape if I don't reply.

Sorry random person. There was a time when I could give thoughtful responses to everybody who sent me a private message. That time was about 400,000 followers ago. Now I'm writing an FAQ instead of a regular post so that I can reply with this to generic questions I get a zillion of.

But go ahead and ask again. I can cut and paste the URL of this snazzy new FAQ to you.


Hey you posted my thing/my friend's thing/a thing I know the source of/a webcomic I want to see succeed. Can you make an attribution/repost with credit/give me a shout out?

Yes. Thank you. Crediting artists is important to me since I am one. There are half a million of you and one of me and the internet is a big place where reverse image searches don't always work (or are directly deceived), people steal images and add their own watermark, and where it's impossible to know who is happy to go viral with mere watermark credit, who wants a shout out, who wants a URL link, and who will be upset if their page isn't shared from directly.

I appreciate the help.

I will add one caveat to this. The world is full of people who are so desperate to promote themselves that they might try to take credit for something they didn't actually create. Or more likely they will post something (gotten from elsenet) and then assume that I (having also got it from elsenet) MUST have gotten it from their site. If you are the original creator of something, I absolutely want you to have credit, but send me a link to the original image. I tend to err on the side of trust, but if you send me a link to your tumblr (or whatever) and it's full of thousands of memes you've just reposted over the years, I'm probably going to be skeptical.


You should just make sure you know where something is from!

Like all the other pages and Tumblrs and Pinterests, right?

Look, I do my best. I always hit "share" if the source page matches the author. However, some of the stuff I'm posting has been image grabbed and reposted thousands of times. Some of it has been taken credit for by five or six different sources. Some of it would take some serious detective work to track down. Doing more would change the time I take to find an image from a minute or two to as many as 15-20. And that's PER post.  That would add hours a day to my schedule, and that would add a level of difficulty I'm just not able to do. I would abandon the effort altogether.

Since there's one of me and 3/4 of a million of you, maybe if you see something you want credited, you could just let me know where it's from, and I'll edit the OP right away.

And I know people's hearts are in the right place but even so, super shitty sanctimonious comments drift into the territory of my commenting policy.


I would like to volunteer.

That is so sweet!

Currently, I don't have a lot of volunteer opportunities. You can keep your eyes open for the posts where I'm hoping to get a transcription. And if you see a typo and want to give me a shout out, that wouldn't be unwelcome. And if you have the chops to write a guest post, but then don't take the money when I try to pay you, that could technically be volunteering.

But here's the thing. I don't want to take advantage of this. I  pay my editors, guest bloggers, and website designers, and come up with some kind of trade in trade with anyone else unless they insist they don't want that money. So please only do this if you really really really want to volunteer.

Ironically, one of the best ways you can help the most (beyond a donation) is super easy: just engage with the posts I send over from my blog. The FB algorithm is a cross between a greedy shitgibbon, a lawyer with a $50k retainer, a code monkey who will do anything to stop free advertising except actually come up with a way to separate advertisers from content creators, and Satan. So tossing a like or a comment on those posts is an almost zero-effort way to help me be seen by more people, and it makes a big difference.

I answered your question/told you where something was from/mentioned a problem in one of your posts, but you didn't react.

Did you do that in the comments? Because like I said up above, I can't really read the comments. If it's important, send me a PM. I check back when I can, but that's really only a glance at the top comments of the most recent posts.


Can I get an autograph?

Um...sure?

This is all very new to me and weird and I've got huge imposter syndrome and I still think people who want my autograph are trying to trick me somehow, but this question keeps coming up, so I better answer it.

If you let me know you'd like to send me physical correspondence, I will give you a P.O. Box address that I check regularly.

Send me something I can sign (I don't have a book I've authored or anything yet) with a self addressed stamped envelope, and I will sign it and send it back. Please cover all the postage both ways.

Or just give me your address and I'll send you a postcard.

I won't turn down a donation, but there is no "charge."


I can't believe you're okay with what's going on in the comments on that one post.

I CAN'T READ ALL THE COMMENTS.

Writing About Writing maxes out its 100 notifications badge in less that four or five minutes. I don't know how many comments I get every day, but it's way too many for me to have read them. Some posts get threads that are thousands long. I've seen posts that are six months old still having people basically chatting in the comments on them. It's not that I didn't care. It's most likely that I didn't even know.

If something has gone past your ability to handle, and you need me to step in as an admin, link me to the post and tell me what the problem is.


Here's a poem I wrote, and have sent you, unsolicited.

That's amazing! It's identical to a poem I just deleted unread.


If you're so overwhelmed, why don't you get admins?

Well, aside from the occasional Social Justice Bard post or maybe a macro that suggests that bigotry isn't awesome just because people who don't suffer systematic forms of it have decided that a particular expression is no big deal or something horrifying to Status Quo Defenders like the idea that representation matters, I don't really get the kind of comments off of grammar jokes and "You should be writing" memes that require roving bands of admins. I can swing through posts like the ones above, clean up the worst offenders, and trust that most of my followers are adults who will message me if they need me to step in. [Please include the link as well as telling me what's going on. Sometimes the comments rage for DAYS and I won't be able to just figure out which post you're talking about.]

And even though admins can reply to messages, having them handle "Can you post my thing?" or "Will you read my story?" isn't really what I think anyone would want to do. The last one whose job it was to answer my inbox left me for a beluga whale named Percival.

Basically, it's the wrong kind of "overwhelmed" for farming out the work. Hopefully this FAQ helps–or at least helps me to feel better about ignoring some of the questions that are answered here.


Hello from my sock puppet account that I made specifically to message you. We meet again, Mr Brecheen! Why did you ban my main account? Is it because you hate the founding principles of democracy like free speech? And can I get reinstated because I've suddenly realized that shitting on that post means now I don't get all the rest of your awesome content?

(Okay, maybe this exact phrasing isn't, strictly speaking, FREQUENT)

Why did this happen? Probably because you violated the commenting policy. I didn't write that just to hear myself speak. Or um...read myself write. (That does not work nearly as well.) I don't have time for warnings and explanations and the inevitable back and forth arguments that come from them. Pretty much every place you ever go has rules and a code of conduct whether it's to keep your shoes and shirt on or to keep your voice down if you don't want the librarian to shush and glare. And if you blithely ignore them, they show you the door. It has nothing to do with fucking democracy.

And if you message my personal account and I don't see "I'm sorry" in the first couple of lines, I just delete the shit unread. Hope you spent HOURS on it boyo.

I might be willing to unban someone if they apologize, but I'm not going to do so on a timetable that would allow them to jump right back into whatever argument got them banned in the first place. So you will have to hang in the penalty box for a while either way.


For a page about writing....

I'm going to stop you right there, boss.

Is what you're about to say kind of elitist, snotty, shitty, jerkwaddy, fucknozzly? Are you about to complain about the proper use of subjunctive in a FB post. Is this going to be a comment where you sneer down your nose because my text to speech picked a homophone and I was too Driving on the Freeway to fix it right away? Are you about to laugh at my non-academic use of punctuation. Do you have something to say about "climbing down" ladders, "making" money, splitting infinitives, ending sentences in prepositions, or beginning them with coordinating conjunctions.

A) Fuck off.

B) Go teach high school if you want to be that person. The adults are trying to have a conversation.

C) I get paid....professionally....with like actual money to basically make fun of assholes. Are you sure you want this to be your play?

D) If insist on saying it anyway, you the ONLY thing keeping you from getting banned might be how long it's been since I've gotten well and truly laid. Be warned.


Did you delete my comment?

Yeah maybe.

More likely just set it so that only you and your friends could see it. There are reasons I do that ranging from it being just a little too acerbic to something problematic that I don't want to have a thirty comment fight with people saying "Well *I* didn't see a problem with it," to my personal pet peeve of people who answer mailbox questions without reading the article, or projectile word vomit like five or six hefty paragraphs in response to a title clearly without having actually read the article.

Comments are moderated on this page and you should read the commenting policy if you don't know exactly how and why.

I don't erase comments that disagree with me. You can see that easily from a casual glance at any post that is even moderately controversial. I erase comments that are buckets of anal sphincters.


But that means you're biased in favor of liberals and progressive values! You let liberals get away with more. What about conservatives? What about libertarians? You are where FREEZE PEACH goes to die!!! What about folks on 'the other side.'

What about them? I'm not running the goddamned debate club here, and no one is entitled to feed my posts through their ideological filters and then comment without consequence. I do a thing. If you don't like that thing AND can't scroll past that thing AND have to comment AND can't comport yourself in any way other than an edge-lord shithead, my page is not for you anyway.  If you want to take umbrage or a shot, fucking play nice. I'm not going to excuse bigotry because some people believe it exists on a political spectrum they're entitled to discuss anywhere and everywhere they want to and that white nationalists and nazis and racists and misogynists deserve to be able to drop whatever dehumanizing festering shit turd of a comment they can pinch out in the name of free speech whether they agree with it or just haven't grown out of their basic edgelord immaturity long enough to realize people's lives are at stake. I'm not here to host the bullshit idea that reacting to oppression with angry internet words is "just as bad" as the oppression itself.

If you can't just keep that scroll wheel turning and you simply HAVE to disagree with my politics, there are a million ways to do so that won't get you banned. (I've got that artists' weakness for nuance and humanization, so seriously all you have to actually do is not be a fucknoodle.) And while there is a complicated point to be made about power differentials and privilege, if it helps you feel better to just imagine that I am unfairly meaner to anyone who isn't a liberal, knock yourself out.


Can we be Facebook friends?

[Okay, people don't really ask me this, per se; they just send me friends requests.]

Yes, you may, but let me make a few disclaimers:

• This is my public account: Chris Brecheen (Public) If you've stumbled upon my private account, the answer will be no. That account is for friends, family, and people I've known online either for a very long time or have developed a rapport with. It's not the VIP room or anything, but it's an essential aspect of a private life as my online persona becomes very public. I need to trust those people aren't just with me for the show.
• You might want to follow for a while and decide IF you want to send me a friend request. I'm definitely not everyone's cup of tea with the geekery and the social justice stuff. 99.9% of my posts are public, so you really wouldn't be missing anything except the ability to comment.
• If you don't care for my (very) occasional social issues post on the Writing About Writing Facebook Page, you will like my profile even less. I write about that stuff almost daily.
• I can be a bit much for people. I post a lot. 
• I have 1 "Note" that is a Commenting Policy for this profile. You should read it before charging in. ESPECIALLY before charging into a contentious post.
• Send me a PM with your request. (Don't worry, I check my "Message Requests" at least once a day.) That account gets around 200-500 friend requests a week. I reject most of them because I don't know if they're there to sell me sunglasses, phish my info from a pr0n site, or just pick a fight in the comments. So send me a message along with the request.

More to come....

Best Horror Not Written by a Cis Het White Man

What is the very best horror written by a woman or POC or member of the LGBTQ+ community? 

Our latest poll is live!  Come vote!

This poll is from our Year of Diverse Polls. If you have any questions about the limitations of the poll, just follow the link.

Our poll was pulled from your nominations, and though I'm Spock-eyebrowing a couple of clearly speculative or science fiction titles, I mostly just tally up the nominations. And since I'm on vacation and not feeling super great, I'm just going to put it up and try to get two wound up kids to bed.

The actual poll is on the left hand side at the bottom, beneath the "About The Author" section. Mobile viewers will have to go aaaaaaall to the very bottom of their page and switch to "Webview" in order to access the poll.

Since we have quite a few titles, everyone will get four (4) votes.

There is no way to rank votes, so please consider that every vote beyond the first "dilutes" the power of your initial vote and use as few as you can stand to use.

This poll will be up for a couple of weeks. You can vote once a week. Since I can't stop shenanigans, I encourage as much of it as possible. Vote early, vote often.

Two Days Off

Not that I'm ever into sparklers and jingoism (I'm more of the "read justice Sotomayor's scathing dissent" type), but this year is feeling particularly meh.

However, I still give the staff the day off on bank holidays. And since we're doing Thursdays off during summer school, we'll see you all on Friday when I will be out of town and Jazz Handing it up. But we'll be home on Sunday and ready to hit the ground running as fast as is possible during the last half of my summer school session.

SECONDS NEEDED (Best Horror not by a Cis Het White Man)

What is the very best horror book (or possibly series?) written by a woman or POC or member of the LGBTQ+ community?  


This poll is from our Year of Diverse Polls. Please check this page out if you have questions about the narrowed focus.

This poll will be going live on Friday. (The normal Friday post will be pushed off until I get back this weekend from a short trip.) If a title doesn't get nominated and seconded (and maybe thirded) it won't end up on our poll. 

Please go to the original post for rules, to check out what's there for seconding, and to drop your nomination. Our poll goes live soon!

Your Help is Needed. (That's right YOU....uh....YOUR)

Hi there wonderful readers.

It's true. I really do need your help. Even just a little tiny bit of it. (Even if all you can afford to do is like and maybe share this post so that other people can see it too.) But feel free to read on, and gain gritty insight about the inner workings of trying to be a working artist and/or working writer in today's internet culture.

Today marks the third week of of six where I'm doing  "pledge drive." It'll be on Monday this week since A) I didn't do one last week due to the schedule SNAFU and B) tomorrow I need to remind people to nominate and offer up seconds for our next poll. Wednesday is a holiday, and I do still take those off (at least from blogging--I never take days off from writing.) So it was pretty much this or Friday.

We are 84% of the way to our next major goal here at Writing About Writing. That goal is where I stop worrying that without a zillion side gigs, I won't be able to cover the rising cost of health insurance and taxes under an administration that doesn't want to subsidize the former or let me write off my my desk and laptop on the latter.

Image description: bar mostly full and
text that says 84% complete.
Though that's from zero to the total amount
(not from the last met goal) so I'm going to be happy if
we close the gap and elated if we hit it.

Normally our air/fuel mixture is a lot more towards the content side. I don't even put up a post like this one more than once a month. But since budgets for the coming 12 months or so need to be finalized by early August, and I am overwhelmed by summer school anyway, I thought I'd take a moment to try and hit a goal that isn't "making it" but is "enough progress that it seems plausible that someday I might."


This is a screenshot from MY PATREON.  It's a shot of one of the admin pages that only I can see.

Image description: Text- June 2018 summary -$44.84 in pledges, +6 patrons

How can I gain six patrons but lose $44 in income?

I'm so glad you asked!

One of my really big Patrons had to cut back pretty hard when life hit them in the tender bits. Maybe I'll get them back if life comes round with the megascrill again, or maybe I won't. The mercurial winds of fate tear at us all, and I know this is a particularly fraught time for anyone to be committing big chunks of money every month to a "local artist." This happens quite frequently actually. My income fluctuates pretty wildly and is known to go up or down by as much as 15% in a single month.

Never a dull moment, eh?

HOWEVER.....it helps me to illustrate a wonderful point. While I love my big donors beyond my ability to adequately express, I would be a lot less vulnerable to a single gust of those winds of fate if I actually had a lot of little donors too. $1 and $5 donors form a healthy "ecosystem" of patronage that is less threatened by the loss of large donors. In fact, the reason I'm not panicking now is because of so many of the small donors that are already here. Losing fifty bucks a month sucks, but it's no longer over ten percent of my income.

In fact, if a mere ten percent of my eight hundred thousand and change of my Facebook followers would sign up for JUST a dollar a month I would....

No? 

A guy can dream, okay?

Now I have good news on my side-gigs front. I'm doing.....okay.

I don't think I'm going to have to give up and go punch a clock any time soon as long as I keep being okay with having 3 roommates in a 2 bedroom place and eating a lot of PB&Js. One of these side gigs is going to be around for at least a few more years, and long before it goes away, another will flower into full bloom, and I should be able to phase out pet-sitting and focus more on writing.

Of course even my most writing-friendly side gigs (like pet sitting) still take time and energy away from writing. If I had my way it could be 100% writing all the time.

That also means that I can huff and puff and pass the hat with my big adorable eyes, but I probably don't really even have to threaten to put Google ads back up here. (Yes, it's technically a few more dollars, but I don't particularly like not having control of what ads show up, being a capitalist tool, or the limitations on what I can say if I am writing a for-profit blog.) Still, it would be nice if this pledge drive brought in some money I could count on.

Pictured: Big, adorable eyes.

I have like twelve levels of Patreon goals going all the way up to amounts that actually literally make me laugh. Then again, if that one asshole can make five grand a month for trashing feminism, maybe there's hope. (Seriously fuck that guy.)

Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh.  You are reckless. 

Wait...that's Yoda.

Retirement. Heh. A small studio apartment. Heh. You are feckless. 

Um....anyway, some of the smaller goals we have actually hit and passed have to do with continuing to write full time and keeping the lights on around here. And I can't thank you all enough for that. The question now is whether or not I can phase out these side gigs sooner or later and devote myself full time to writing.

Some of my down-the-road goals are because my current living situation won't last forever (nor would I want it to). Some because eventually this buttercup is going to have to do some up-sucking and start contributing to some kind of retirement plan that is a little more sophisticated than "Hope nothing ever goes wrong!" But right now....today....at least hitting this ONE goal before my "pledge drive" is over will be a step in the right direction enough to give me hope that the rest can be done given time.

Since this blog's inception, due to the breathtaking generosity of patrons and donations from readers like you, we have been able to:

• Quit teaching during the regular year and write instead
• Bring you more content
• Remove the annoying ads
• Up the number of high quality posts each week
• (Not to put too fine a point on it, but we've been able to keep bringing you content through what would otherwise have been some completely devastating life transitions that would have put most bloggers on hiatus) 
• Gone from five posts a week to six
• And we've been able to take far fewer random days off

Here are some things I'd like to add if we continue to get more support:

• Even more posts, and more high-quality posts (less jazz hands)
• But also more and better quality jazz hands 
• A seventh and even eight post each week (or more?)
• A greater number of carefully (perhaps even professionally) edited and revised posts
• More fiction
• Always and ever free longer fiction (books)
• An always, forever, ad free experience on Writing About Writing

The mere cost of twelve dollars a year–just ONE DOLLAR a month–gets you in on backchannel conversations with other patrons, polls, and conversations about future projects including sometimes me trying to get your input. For five dollars you get cute selfies of me and the pets I sit.  For ten you get an early access post as often as I can get them written. But perhaps, most importantly, you'll be supporting an artist to continue making art and entertainment that is open to everybody.

So if you like what I do and want to see me do more of it, don't want to see me have to do less of it, please consider a small pledge. We wouldn't have gotten this far without our patrons, and we can't do more without you.

Again here is that link:  https://www.patreon.com/chrisbrecheen

Act now and you won't even be billed until August!

And of course if committing to a monthly amount isn't feasible, you can always make a one-time donation through my Paypal (at the top left of the screen). There are also ways to help that don't have a price tag, including just liking, commenting, or sharing THIS post on social media so that more folks see it.

[Note: In a revised form, perhaps with more bells and whistles, a version of this post will be going up for three more Wednesdays.]

Best of May 2018

The highest page-viewed, non-poll posts from May (not from June...we're a little behind here) that will go on to be sung of by master scops and bards in the halls of glory and renown––also known as our Greatest Hits menu.  May was actually a generally okay month, but it brought up some good questions about what "baseline" busy means around here and the need to revisit my priorities as soon as summer school is over. I simply have to find a way to do less of all this side gig stuff all the time and much more writing.

Words Fucking Matter

"But Chris....he was talking about M-13!" Was he? Was he really? Has anything you've seen before or since given you the impression that distinction is important to him.

Fortune Cookie XV

Making little macros of beach scenes with one's OWN quotes on them is considered uncouth.

Can You get up One More Time (Success in the World of Art)

How have I managed to make money and build an audience writing? It's not talent, I can tell you that.