Talking Shop

The last pitch I submitted on which an editor was amenable hovered around 09-10, on hearing loss. Byline only, until I mentioned my Inquirer clip. Then the woman offered me 250, which illustrates guidelines are negotiable. Then I blew it, and haven't forgiven myself since, but I blew it because my parameters fell apart, and I lost my sense of direction, which was more or less how does hearing decline due to aging fit into deaf culture? I was too vague, and these days, exhausted. 

Do I go back into all that research and try to salvage an article? Approach the same editor after submitting what amounted to a bad term paper? I knew what querying was in high school, and had I applied myself and skinned my knees bloody then, perhaps I might have survived the digital transition. I was happy at AccessLife. I do not let my audience know that often enough. Some columnists wanted to sue the owners when the resource site crashed, but not me. I was reporting, and they paid me a decent commission without stiffing me. They could have, but Florida isn't all about Stand Your Ground and George Zimmerman. I had the best boss I ever had in Dave

Examiner.com was another matter. 15 dollars after nine months of reviews is worse than the efforts I've posted to this account for absolutely nothing, and though they promoted me to an AXS writer. I hit a wall uploading event content with the appropriate tags, and told the poor editors, scraping by themselves no doubt on a 10k dime, "fuck you". I cannot return to that level of obscenity, and I'm currently sweating a spec piece as per this communique, and do not have the tears to weep if I am losing myself to a fugue state, which is how Jean-Claude Le Marre put the 05 Brothers in Arms together.

In my study of films for this account, simply on my own, I've learned that the western genre is about the underlying anxieties of America's golden age, or an expose on corruption, or familial dysfunction as it was handled back then, just as The Quick and the Dead offered us the insider's game on how glamorizing the cowboy became Hollywood. Le Marre seems to be making the same play in this carefully groomed progressive tale, which has no credibility whatsoever. You cannot inject TMZ's vision of 21st century diversity into the 19th century, even if you have embittered free blacks eaten alive by revenge and third degree burns.