Working for free

A few weeks ago, I noticed there was a citizen’s blog section on our local newspapers website. I clicked the “Interested in Blogging” link and after an email exchange had received a tentative go from one of the editors, along with an attachment explaining the terms of contract.  I felt excited to almost have a blog again, and one that would hopefully be read by a lot of people.

Then I read through the agreement.  Everything seemed pretty standard except one thing.  My rights to my writing.  Basically, by agreeing to have my blog hosted on our local paper’s site, I would lose my publishing rights.  In other words, my writing would have to be exclusive to their site and I couldn’t reuse my work for anything else.

Which would make sense, except they weren’t including any sort of compensation.  I’d be writing for nothing.

It’s hard to decide which opportunities are paying dues and worth the investment for better opportunities down the road and which ones aren’t.

I asked Steph’s dad about it, a writer/editor/consultant who’s been in the business for over 25 years.  He basically said it doesn’t make any sense for writers to give up their rights to their writing and earn nothing so that other people can earn money from it forever.  And that it’s because situations like this that set up the expectations that writers should be content to work for little or nothing.

This experience has reminded me of how much I enjoy writing and how I think I’d still like to keep it on the table as a career possibility, but I think I’d like to just write when I want and for my own blog.  So, for now, at least, I’ve decided to this opportunity go.

Emoallen survives

When I was about 16 years old, tremorseven.com was the authority in being an out of place high schooler and probably thinking just a little too highly of yourself.  Written by emoallen, a “nice guy” high school senior who continually was having his heart broken and seemed anxious to get away and do something more, it became easy to relate to his feelings of loneliness and easier to covet his writing style that had made Allen somewhat of a blog celebrity.

It’s been six years now since I found myself fascinated with this stranger from a PA town I’d never heard of, with romance problems with girls I’d never known and weekend adventures with friends I’d never know.  Still, Allen made quite an impression on me from the time I’d started reading his blog.  I was even sort of an investor, haha.  When I was a senior in high school and money came easily with my cushy job at the local golf course, I sent him twenty bucks when he announced the site was reaching bandwidth quota; I guess I just felt I could help and I certainly took up my fair share of page loads. Even when I was in college and he’d stopped tremorseven, I’d think about him sometimes and would do a quick Google search to see if he had made it big with a novel or book of poetry.

A few years ago I came across a few articles he’d written for the student paper up at Penn State.  I was surprised to hear the faithful following he’d accumulated a few years earlier was gone; comments below his articles were mixed, with some were downright harsh, criticizing Allen for being insensitive in his ideas and unrealistic.

I’ve been thinking about what writing on the Internet means.  The permanence it can have not only in influence, but also in longevity is amazing. I’m sure there are thousands of other people my age who have a small piece of their brain that will associate their late adolescence partly with emoallen and tremorseven.com.  And, thanks to the Internet Archive, tremorseven will live on.

I’m thinking about what it means that everything posted to the internet is more or less archived.  Google has its cached pages, the Internet Archive has its Way Back Machine…  What does it mean for Allen Tingley to have Tremorseven archived for anyone to see?  Employers, girlfriends, family…  I guess it’s just sort of strange to think that things written right now will be accessible in how ever many years into the future with unprecedented clarity.  That’s sort of daunting when writing a blog post!

Modern rules of blogging

What rules do bloggers have for their blogs to ensure privacy and protect their loved ones?  This is a question I’ve been grappling with recently.

One of the blogs I really enjoy and respect is dooce.com.  I’m certainly not alone.  Heather Armstrong started dooce.com 8 years ago and in that time has won a bunch of awards, been on lots of TV shows, in newspapers, all that stuff.  I’d guess she has the largest read blog that isn’t centered around politics or sports or any other special interest, but just about the author’s life.  I think it’s her subject matter that really draws people to her site, though she is no doubt a good writer. When you visit her site, you’ll find she writes mostly about her husband, daughter, daughter on the way, her two dogs…  Of course there are lots of posts reflecting on the world around her, her past, her family, too, but for the most part her posts are very close to home.

Which is awesome.  I think good writers naturally write about the things that impact them the most, and nothing impacts you more than your family. I just wonder what’s off limits for bloggers writing these kinds of blogs.

Ironically, just as I was bouncing this question around in my head, I noticed a video on dooce.com addressing this very question.

It sounds like the general consensus in the video is don’t write something about someone that you wouldn’t feel comfortable telling to their face in front of a group of people. According to her blog, Dooce didn’t think anyone would read besides her inner circle and as a result wasn’t always careful with what she was writing. She was fired from the job she held and alienated from her family, at least temporarily.

But, as far as I can tell, she also now writes from home for a living and supports her family with all the traffic her blog gets.  That sounds like the life!

I guess it’s just something to keep in mind.  Writing this blog is so different from writing for UU!  Gonna take a little getting used to I think.

New Blog

Around the New Year, I started to get that old familiar feeling.  I really wanted to write something again. Amidst all these new experiences and feelings, I really wanted an outlet.  I wanted a new blog.

I guess this feeling isn’t that new, but it’s manifested itself in a few different ways over the years.  In high school, my “blog” was private, known only to  the few that I gave the Geocities URL.  In college, it was UMBC Underground, the alternative news source that I created to rival the existing school newspaper and bring about a sense of community among students. This I wrote under an alias.  And over the years, there have consistently been journals filled with some reflections but mostly with to-do’s and temporarily relevant snippets.

But I realized: this will be the first blog I’ve ever done that’s public.  Like, with my real name, right there for all to see.  Honestly, it feels terrifying.  I’ve been planning and delaying this opening post for about a week, a little too freaked about the openness and task of actually finding things to write about consistently to start.  Though still a little spooked, I’m going to give it a shot. Stay tuned.