My friend Terence Anthony just got interviewed about his terrific play “Blood & Thunder.” Here’s what he has to say.

The play has been running at Moving Arts for six months, but it must must must (must!) close last weekend of this month. It is definitely a don’t-miss, so if you’re in LA, well, don’t. Here’s where to get more info — and tickets.

When I was a kid, comic book editors were thoughtful enough to include the mailing addresses of fans who wrote in. There’s a whole generation of us who made a lot of good friends that way.

Now we have the internet.

Which is how I received this communication today:

Hi, my name is Isabel R–. I am 13 years old, I live in Mexico City and I now study in the American School Foundation. Right now in my civics class we are making a project about our future. I currently love theater, and it’s my lifetime dream to be a part of it and spend my whole life on it. I want to study acting, but I seriously don’t think I could be that good, so instead I would just love to direct, be in charge of everyone and be responsible [for] the whole play. This is why I was wondering if you could answer me an interview about your studies. I seriously respect you because you are a director, and in my opinion it takes a lot to be one.
I hope you will answer,
Isabel R–
P.S if you don’t have the time to answer or email me back, don’t worry I know you must be full of work 😉

Here’s my reply:

————

Isabel, I am indeed full of work. (And full of a lot else, too.) But I’m happy to answer you. The theatre is a wonderful thing to devote your life to. If you want to, you should do it.

Before we get to the questionnaire you attached, I’d like to say this:  You should study acting. Why? Three reasons:

1.    Because you want to. Thirteen is far too young to decide that you can’t be good at something. Know what the right age is? Never. Last month I heard a radio interview with an 82-year-old woman who had just piloted a plane for the first time. At age 80, she decided that she wanted to learn to fly, and now, two years later, she was flying solo. It’s not a good idea to limit yourself at any age. (It’s also good to have grandchildren to take away the keys, if necessary.)
2.    You should act because you want to, and you should act because it will help you as a director. Directors work with actors. That means you need to understand acting and actors. No, I was never an actor. But I did some acting in both high school and college (poorly, I might add), and since then I’ve done staged readings that I’ve been drafted into. And every Saturday I get to read at least one part in my workshop. Do some acting. It’s fun. And even if you’re bad, nobody dies as a result.
3.    It’s good to fail. Failure teaches you things. It’s also good to succeed. What isn’t good is to not try. Don’t avoid failure, or you won’t try enough new things.

Okay, let’s tackle that questionnaire.

1.    What did you study?

I have no formal theatre training. None. I have degrees in Communications (Associate of Arts), Literature and Language (Bachelor of Arts), and Professional Writing (a Masters degree). This qualifies me to answer your questionnaire, and to answer things for people even when I don’t know what I’m talking about. You learn that how you say things can lend a certainty to your tone that convinces others; that’s useful. It’s amazing what you can get away with when you sound confident. I also took a lot of science in college, and I’m glad I did. Other than the writing classes, the classes that stuck with me the most were probably Logic and Philosophy which, compiled with the others, form the backbone of criticism. Oh, I did study playwriting in graduate school, but it didn’t teach me how to write plays – I was already getting produced, after all. But it helped build my circle of contacts.

2. Where did you study?

I think you’re asking me theatre-related questions. What I would say is this:  To learn the theatre, you get involved with theatre. You attend plays, you volunteer, who do photocopying and script reading and chewing-gum-scraping and whatever else they need. And then, one day, an actor doesn’t show up and you read that part to help out. Or, in my case, the cool kids are putting on a high school play and even though you’re invited to participate, they don’t invite your other friends (the non-cool kids), and you don’t feel good about that, so you wind up writing your own play expressly for those uncool kids.  And then when you hear people in the audience laugh at your funny lines, you are hooked forever.

The simple lesson:  In most things in life, you learn by doing. So go get involved with directors and actors and playwrights and costume designers and stage managers and lighting designers and all the other theatre people and you’ll learn everything. Because theatre people – honestly – can do everything. They have to.

3. How long?

To this day. On Saturdays I convene a playwriting workshop (for almost 20 years now), and I’m always glad to learn new things from the smart talented people who come. And at least a couple of times a month, I go see plays. Even bad ones are useful (although annoying). You can learn good things from bad plays.

4. Did you study an MBA?

That’s a business degree. (Now I own a business (not my first) and am once again completely self-taught. Libraries and book stores and the internet are wonderful things.) I believe you mean an MFA. I have an MFA-equivalent degree. It is a terminal degree, but I am living with it.

5. If yes, where did you study it? How long?

The University of Southern California. In general, a graduate degree requires two years. What you learn may not be as important as who you meet. Building a network of contacts is important.

6. After studying, in what have you worked?

I have written radio commercials, billboards, plays, advertising copy, fundraising letters, essays, poems, cartoon strips, short stories, websites, interviews, speeches, public service announcements, headlines, newspaper stories, technical specs, instructions, magazine articles, and just about everything else you can imagine. At some time or other I’ve been paid in almost every conceivable field of writing. (Yes, I even got paid for poems once.) I own a creative marketing agency (with another theatre person!) named Counterintuity. That allows me to offer creativity all over the place. Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and a scientist; Benjamin Franklin was a writer and statesman and scientist and inventor; Will Eisner was one of the founders of comic books and graphic novels, and also a businessman. I am inspired by their greatness.

7. What have you been doing lately?

See above. Plus, I travel frequently. And I read a lot. And I like to take long walks with friends and my dog and smoke cigars. (The dog doesn’t smoke.) And I like to play games with my family and by myself (“Risk” on my iPhone, “Civilization” on my laptop, and “Oblivion” on the xBox.) I also go to the theatre, of course. Last night three friends and I went to see a play that we didn’t like at all, but we had great fun afterward, and that made it worth it.
8. As you have worked in plays, what have been your favorite or most famous?

Almost all the plays I have directed are new plays. The theatre I founded in 1992 does only new plays. I’ve directed world premieres by Trey Nichols, Werner Trieschmann, Sheila Callaghan, EM Lewis, and many others. I don’t direct as often any more because I don’t have time, but I make an effort to do it at least once a year. Last year, I directed four times and am still unclear how that was possible. Famous playwrights whose work I like include Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Mamet, Labute, Albee, Kushner, and August Wilson. I think that Shakespeare guy is pretty good too. I am a big fan of Buster Keaton, so any well-done commedia del arte excites me; a couple of years ago I flew across country just to see Bill Irwin’s new show. It was well worth it.

9. In the play, what is your job?

To make an impact other than boredom on the audience.
10. What [do] you get out of this career?

Brief bursts of intense satisfaction. Followed by an addictive need for more.

11. Do you live well with your job?

I’m not sure what you mean, but I’m going to try to answer what I think you mean. I make my living being a creative storyteller, sometimes for business clients, sometimes for audiences or students. Stories are at the core of who we are. The human brain has grown and expanded because we developed language, and we developed language because we needed to share stories – about the hunt, about our struggles, about who we are and want we want. Without stories, we would all still be in the trees. It’s enormously gratifying to move an audience with a story you’re telling – whether it’s a ticket-buying audience watching one of my plays, or an audience of two in a business setting. It’s also enormously gratifying to get pulled into the stories of others whose voice you respond to. I’m lucky enough to have very smart, very funny friends who keep me surprised and entertained.


12. Has this career choice made you happy?

I don’t believe in happiness. Pursuing it is fine, but I don’t know anyone who has gotten it, and if anyone were to get it, I don’t know what he or she would do next. I do believe in work, good work, and in remembering that on any given day, most people in the world are worse off than I am. Bear that in mind and it’s easier to focus on your work.

Thank you for emailing me. Keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll always be someplace interesting. I apologize if my reply isn’t as good as Rilke’s, but no one’s is.

The simplification movement has given us advice like this:

The Problem

E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

The Solution

Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.

two.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be two sentences or less. It’s that simple.

That’s potentially great. It’s also potentially disastrous. English, like most languages, requires nuance. If your email message is regarding something more elaborate than, say, “Good. See you there,” it’s not  done well in two sentences. Moreover, writing well while writing short is difficult — in many cases, it would take you more time to answer shorter.

I also can’t help pointing out that this bit of communications advice commits an error:  They mean to say “two sentences or fewer,” not “less.” If you’re going to be brief, at least be right.

I put Stephen King’s latest novel, “Under the Dome” on my Christmas list because the premise of a town getting cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious invisible dome sounded like fun, and because although it had been a long time since I’d read one of his books, I had enjoyed every one I’d read. I say this by way of saying that it is with a heavy heart that I come not to praise Stephen King, but to bury him.

Admittedly, no one expects Stephen King to be a prose stylist. If you want, say, Henry James, you know where to turn. But we do expect Stephen King to be a master storyteller; that is his métier. It is also his reputation. Google “ ‘Stephen King’ ‘master storyteller’ ” and you’ll get 11,000 citings. Go ahead, try it.

And yet, “Under the Dome” is not a story masterfully told. It isn’t even well-told. In fact, it’s very badly told, in the plotting, in the characters, and yes, in the truly awful prose. Perhaps worst of all, a wonderful premise rife with possibility is squandered on one-dimensional characters and a truly deus ex machina ending.

First, the prose. Again, I didn’t go into this book looking for literary prose. But it’s fair to expect more than what’s here from someone who has been behind the typewriter for 35 years, who has written 70 books, and who is the 18^th best-selling fiction writer in history. It’s not that the writing in “Under the Dome” isn’t gifted; it’s that it’s truly terrible.

Some samples drawn from the book:

1.

Like Piper, Lester mentioned the testing concept – an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history – but his major theme had to do with the infection of sin, and how God dealt with such infections, which seemed to be squeezing them with His Fingers the way a man might squeeze a troublesome pimple until the pus squirted out like holy Colgate.

Evidently, God squeezes the infection of sin the way man might squeeze a pimple filled with holy toothpaste.

I didn’t know God was concerned with infections.

If he is, I’m not sure he squeezes them. How does one squeeze an infection?

I’m not sure sin is an infection.

Pimples contain pus, but pus isn’t like toothpaste.

Pus erupts from pimples; toothpaste flows from tubes, it doesn’t erupt.

How is toothpaste holy? Or is it only Colgate?

Setting aside the metaphor of infected holy toothpaste of sin, exactly what does the aside (“an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history”) add to our understanding of this sentence? Nothing. The book is filled with roadway disasters like this that pull our eye away from the cars in front of us.

2.

A young mother has just fallen over unconscious on the side of a road, her baby strapped onto her back. The baby strikes his head and begins to bleed. Here’s how King depicts this:

A fly settled on his forehead, sampled the blood oozing through the cartoon images of SpongeBob and Patrick, then flew off. Possibly to report this taste-treat at Fly HQ and summon reinforcements.

Rather than arousing our sympathy for the baby (or his mother), we’re asked to speculate about the motivations and movements of a fly. That is, when we’re not cheerily dwelling on the cartoon bandage. The point of view – that of the author, thinking about the fly! – provides a clue into something else that’s so completely wrong with this book:  its utter lack of empathy for the characters. The author doesn’t invest in their plight because he doesn’t believe they’re real, and so neither do we.

3.

He was as happy as a maggot in dog-puke.

We don’t normally associate maggots with dog puke. (Or “dog-puke.” Why this is hyphenated, I don’t know. It’s not a compound adjective. “Dog” is an adjective modifying the noun “puke.” Like most of the book, this error leaves me feeling that the book is simply unedited.) I don’t know if maggots in “dog-puke” are happy, so it’s difficult to gauge how happy “he” is. Here’s what I suspect:  King was going to write “as happy as a fly in shit” – a cliché we all know – but then thought that precisely because it was a cliché, he’d better make it new. And so he turned it into something that isn’t so much new as a second cousin, and one that doesn’t quite make sense. Dog shit hangs around – I’m sure you’ve seen it near sidewalks everywhere. But how often have you seen “dog-puke” out in society? And how long does it last? There’s no way to associate it with maggots.

4.

The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for hands (bad old clutchy-grabbing hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it.

Kids can write better than this. And doesn’t it sound like an adolescent wrote it? Note the slack verbs – “was,” “were,” “was,” “had” – three instances of “to be” and one of “to have,” leaving me wondering if King was the one writer who somehow missed out on reading Hemingway. Action verbs propel a sentence; one would think that a horror/fantasy writer would know this, and part of me believes that at one time King did know this, and has just forgotten. The subject of the third sentence, “It,” seems to refer to “The hat” in the previous sentence, meaning that it’s the hat that “had garden trowels for hands,” but that’s not his intention. He means the overall scarecrow. Finally, the lack of specificity points up the falseness of the entire description:  the thing has a shirt with “something” written on it. Oh. That explains it.

5.

“The Bushey girl,” Big Jim said. “How was she? Was she good?”

Carter hesitated, then said: “A little dry at first, but she oiled up a-country fair.”

Big Jim laughed. The sound was metallic, like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.

Lately, as a party game of my own devising, I’ve been asking friends to duplicate a laugh that sounds metallic, “like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.” So far, no one has been able to do it. Actually, no one has been able to understand what it would sound like. One writer friend visibly winced when I read the line, and looked confused when I asked him to laugh that way. When he asks us to imagine this laugh, I have no idea what Stephen King is asking for, and neither does anyone else I know. Leaving aside a “metallic” laugh, which I suppose would be grating in the way of a rusty hinge and which might be duplicable, I think about the sound of those coins, as replicated by a human throat, and wonder why King didn’t go for the full monty and throw in the sound of the jackpot alarm that summons security guards and onlookers. No, no one can laugh that way – but they can’t do the rest of it either.

6.

She pulled his arm tighter around her, although it wasn’t cold.

This is another example of a pronoun-antecedent disagreement. What he means to say is that even though it (the temperature) wasn’t cold out, she pulled his arm tighter around her. But because of the way he’s constructed the sentence, it would seem that even though his arm isn’t cold, she pulled it tighter around her. This, again, seems the sort of thing an editor should catch.

7.

A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. “Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I’ve kind of forgotten how this thing goes.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Barbie said.

Turned out he was right.

This is another example of tonal mismatch. Read it out loud and cringe. Given the context, I think we’re supposed to feel glad for these characters that they’ve gotten together. But it’s written like low comedy, or an entry for one of those contests of bad writing.

8.

One overweight woman (Mabel Alston; she also suffers from what she calls the dia-betties) sprains her ankle and lies there hollering until a couple of men come over and get her on [sic] remaining good foot. Lennie Meechum, the town postmaster (at least until this week, when delivery of the U.S. mail was canceled for the foreseeable future), borrows a cane for her. Then he tells Henry that Mabel needs a ride back to town. Henry says he can’t spare a car. She’ll have to rest in the shade, he says.

This is not storytelling. These are notes for storytelling. The paragraph reads like an index card plucked off the plotting board, transcribed, and filed away. The parentheticals are in the way and add nothing. And the typo, of eliding the word “her,” which is precisely the sort of error that crops up more frequently as the book moves past page 700, contributes to my sense that the book isn’t properly edited.

The writing is bad. It’s also reflective of what is a very bad novel.

The book shifts verb tenses many times, from past tense to present. At first I thought this was because sections of the story were being told in past tense by a survivor. But no, it appears to be a mistake.

The author constantly interrupts the narrative with asides and judgments that are distracting and wearisome.

The characters are thinly drawn. Jim Rennie, one of the town selectmen, is so transparently bad that every voter in town must be either a reprobate or a fool. Both church pastors are cartoons – one is a hypocritical porn hound who’s been involved in crime; the other is a liberal female do-gooder with a soft touch on God. The heightened fantasy of every character’s situation highlights their innate falseness. Rennie doesn’t just operate a meth lab; no, he’s operating the world’s biggest meth lab with a network extending across the nation. The unbelievability of the situations harms the believability of the characters, which wasn’t strong to begin with.

As for suspense, on which King’s reputation rests, there is little. The mysterious dome that cuts off the small town in rural Maine from the rest of civilization, it transpires, has been put there by alien space children toying with humans for their amusement. No, I am not kidding you. How, then, is the book resolved? One of the townspeople gets to the transmitter and begs a little alien girl to let them go, and the dome magically vanishes into the atmosphere. This is so shameless a deus ex machina I’m surprised the author isn’t embarrassed by it. And what is the role of our hero in the climax of the story? None. He’s not the one who makes the effort to beg the alien girl.

Why, given all this, did I read every word on the 1100 pages of this book?

Part of it was shock. I couldn’t quite believe how had this was. Some years ago, I had read several books by this same author and enjoyed them. This wasn’t just a bad book, this was a very bad book, a book seemingly written by someone who patently couldn’t write. Surely, I thought, this is a hoax of some sort; there is a twist awaiting me past page 1000 that reveals that the story has been narrated badly by some character for a reason.

Another part was that I like to end things I finish. When I shared this with my son, he shared his opinion of that:  “That’s stupid.” In retrospect, he may have been right.

A final part was that there are lessons to be learned here. Words mean things. Writing is important. Good writing makes an impact that bad writing cannot. It’s important to know this and to practice it. Put this way, reading “Under the Dome” was like performing an autopsy to learn how the patient could have survived.

As I got further and further into the book and my shock at its awfulness mounted, as I scribbled notes and stuck markers in pages that were especially bad, my wife finally said, “Yeah, I know, it’s terrible.” This was surprising. Not that she had read my Christmas gift before giving it to me, which was fine, but because she plows through genre novels with a gleeful abandon, and she hated this one. “Wait ‘til you get to the end,” she said. “It gets even worse.”

True. Because when I finished the book I was left to wonder this:  Did Stephen King’s editor, whom he thanks in the afterword, think this was acceptable (or even good) writing? Or was she sufficiently cowed by his reputation to let it all go? And which of these two alternatives is worse? That’s what I’ve been thinking about since.

Today in my playwriting workshop we again discussed unreliable narration, and twist-ending plotting — and then later I took my daughter to see a movie that turned out to exemplify the perils therein.

Unreliable narrators (or protagonists) have made for some of the best debates drawn from literature. Is the knight in the Canterbury Tales the most accomplished hero in medieval history, or is he a boaster with few actual accomplishments? It’s difficult to read Chaucer’s tone on this, and the evidence seems fifty-fifty. In “Turn of the Screw,” is the governess haunted by those ghost children, or is she insane? In Richard Nixon’s autobiography, does he actually believe his lies and justifications, or is he brain-damaged?

But a truly unreliable narration demands that the argument be split both ways so that we doubt. If we can decide early on one way or the other, the game’s over. The narration — or protagonist — can be unreliable, but our conclusion has become definitive. Once that happens, everything afterward starts to look like transparent writing tricks.

The same goes with twist endings. If you can sniff out the twist early on, everything else becomes drudgery. Today in my workshop one writer asked for advice — to pursue writing an unreliable character and a twist, or to expose the device early on and approach the material from a different angle.  Do these twists well and you wind up with “The Sixth Sense.” Do it badly and you wind up with “The Village.” (Or, someone else chimed in, any other M. Night Shyamalan movie.)

So there I was at 2:15 for the beginning of this week’s big new movie, and by the first scene I was sure I knew what was up. By the third scene, I had confirmation. The obvious problem with relying on gimmicks is that if they fail, you have nothing else to entertain people with. The leading man still looks like a rat-faced little boy to me, and his acting in this movie is stapled together from 50’s B-movies and James Cagney, circa the grapefruit-in-your-face era. Even the first scene looks utterly fake, and for reasons that mystify me:  It’s merely of people talking on a boat, and yet the background rolls past like a canvas in a stage melodrama. Is it so difficult to film people on a boat that you need to Photoshop every frame? If you know your lead character can’t be trusted, and that leads you to an immediate conclusion about the unsurprising twist awaiting you an endless two hours and ten minutes in the future, and your popcorn has already run out, what’s left to be enjoyed?

Whenever this happens to me in the movies (and it happens all too often), I wonder if others see things this way. The woman two seats to my left gasped and murmured throughout the movie like a lady with a hand up her skirt. At one point I actually looked over to see if she had been signed out for the day from a nearby facility. But no; she was just slack-jawed in absorption with a truly dumb  and patently phony bit of hooey made by supposedly the greatest living American director. Which left me remembering this exchange from “Annie Hall”:

Alvy Singer (the Woody Allen character):  Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger:  Yeah.
Alvy Singer:  Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I’m exactly the same way.

How much time do writers actually spend writing? This writer estimates his output at between 2 and 5% of his time. If that holds true for most writers, then most writers would be better off holding a job and writing on the side — which is precisely counter to the conventional wisdom.

J.D. Salinger wasn’t seen in public again today, a trend that is expected to continue indefinitely.

The LA Times’ Scott Timberg provides a basic overview of Philip K. Dick’s final years, which Dick spent living in Orange County when it was in its late Reagan period.

This piece makes mention of the forthcoming film adaptation of one of Dick’s finest novels, “Radio Free Albemuth.” I’m always torn when it comes to filmed versions of novels I love.  As a playwright, I love what actors and directors bring to words — the good actors and directors, anyway. But film is a different medium; a novel doesn’t need anyone but the writer. So, in general, I stay away. That didn’t prevent me from seeing the filmed version of “The Road” (more about that later), and I’m still itching to see that film version of “Anna Karenina,” because Alfred Molina seems as though he’d be so perfectly cast as Levin. Of course, once I heard that Molina was playing Levin, I haven’t been able to think of Levin in any other form — and that’s part of the problem.

This story also mentions Dick’s “realist” novels. For many years, I eagerly awaited their posthumous publication; then, unfortunately, they started to get published. “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” which was published in Dick’s lifetime, is an ingenious and completely captivating postmodern story told from three different points of view; ultimately, the entire story may be a lie (or fiction) told by the self-professed “crap artist” of the title. It’s a book that should stand alongside far better known literary American novels of the 20th century.  “Mary and the Giant” has the benefit of an explosive story — a young white girl takes up with a large African-American singer and then an elderly shopkeeper — but is utterly lacking thematic unity; its ending leaves you wondering what it was all about. “Voices from the Street,” written in 1952 and finally published in 2007, makes for less engaging reading than the Chinese phone book. Characters natter on endlessly about nothing. I tried twice to read it and got only halfway. Here’s a review from “In Milton Lumky Territory” that might speak for most of the non-science-fiction books Dick wrote:

Like many of Dick’s main characters in his realistic novels, Bruce and Susan decide they need to move to start again—but missing from most of these novels is what happens to the characters after they have moved. Similarly, the tone of In Milton Lumky Territory is not very adroit; as in his science fiction novels, the story can feel sparse and padded with unneeded adjectives. There is little of the wild conjecture that one finds in Dick’s more popular books; rather than oppressive and violent governments of the future, there are toxic personalities to avoid.

That sounds about right:  Nothing happens in these books.  And no, not much happens in Philip Roth’s latest book either, but it happens far more interestingly because the internal life of the protagonist is so deeply plumbed.

These negatives about the realist novels  aside (and, again, one of them is excellent), I’m confident that Philip K. Dick’s legend and influence will grow even higher. Edgar Allan Poe was a far worse writer, one given to lugubrious prose in his fiction and overstressed cadences in his poetry, but we remember him for inventing the detective story and the gothic horror tale. Dick has made no less an impact in his paranoid but telling vision of an overcommercialized culture controled by the colation of government, business, and celebrity. This vision is best expressed as a whole in three books — “Ubik,” “Radio Free Albemuth,” and “Confessions of a Crap Artist”– and they remain recommended.

There are two kinds of bad books:  the badly conceived and the badly written.

The former can be insidious, inciting war, genocide, civil unrest, poverty, and more. The past century is a catalog of such writing.

Bad writing can be symptomatic of bad thinking, but usually no one dies as a result. That said, though, the novel I just finished reading almost killed me. I have read countless books in my life, including many bad books and very many badly written books. But I’m thinking that the book I just finished is the worst written book I’ve ever read. And it’s by one of the most popular authors in history:  Stephen King.

More soon about the awful time I spent Under the Dome. I have flagged many pages and I will have much to say about them.

Some years ago I made my living as a freelance writer.

While I still make my living as a writer, this column reminds me why I’m glad I’m not counting on freelance magazine and newspaper revenue any more.

By the way, one of the low rates listed in this column comes out to six cents a word. I recall getting paid one cent  a word by The Comics Journal (or a bounteous $25 for an interview) — and constantly having to cajole and threaten to collect that.