Work is hard because it's supposed to be.

[maradydd]

So, I know everyone and their retarded cousin's three-legged dog reads BoingBoing these days, which is why I don't typically repost stuff I find there, but Paul di Filippo's The Joy of Corporate Journalism, by J. Ives Turnkey is sheer, unadulterated frothing brilliance. czarina69, please make sure sclerotic_rings reads it -- apart from the kind words for Science Fiction Eye, I expect it'll give him quite the warm fuzzy.

His description of what it's like to work in the world of corporate journalism is pretty much par from the course, but the part that really stands for me is the bulleted list that appears on page 4, his description of the unwritten dicta that make a Wired article a Wired article. "All references to 'the little people' are minimized." "The past is dismissed as unimportant." "Quotidian matters are de-emphasized." Welcome to the world of modern media; it's not just Wired. This is Slashdot, this is NBC/CBS/ABC, this is your local newspaper, this is what you and everyone around you is being told the road to success and coolness looks like.

This makes me sad. See, I remember reading things that glamorize not just the completion of some achievement, but the struggle it took to get there too. My Side of the Mountain, and how it encouraged my belief that if the kid in that story could work through any situation he faced, so could I. Walden, with Thoreau's lovingly detailed accounts of how he settled into his little corner of the woods. Atlas Shrugged -- my memories of the passages about Dagny falling asleep at her desk as she works to save the railroad have kept me company on many of my own Long Dark Nights of the Code. And I guess it's really no surprise, but also rather ironic, that books champion the journey as much as the destination while articles are all about the flash and bang -- after all, writing a book is a case study in being in it for the long haul, and what was the last news article you read that stayed with you for years? The mark of a non-professional journalist these days, sad to say, is that he actually gives a damn about what he's writing; it's the guys who are just starting their careers who polish everything till it shines, fact-check obsessively, develop a characteristic voice, and turn each article into a little gem. I've known a lot of pro journos in my time, and sad to say, no matter how much one might hope that their work would be a Spider Jerusalem-like labour of love, for the ones who make it a job it just ends up being a matter of punching the clock.

Which I suppose is a long-winded way of saying I've frittered away enough time today and it's time for me to get back into the trenches. But, really, look, it's like this. Some of you reading this seem to be under the impression that I've done one or two things which are actually vaguely important. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. The point is, everything I've accomplished that I've ever given a damn about has been a long hard slog. No matter how much I've loved it, there have been nights I've also hated it, wanted nothing more than to be working on something else, but I've gutted through and finished it anyway out of some delusion that it mattered for something. (Which is probably why I was never any good at homework, come to think of it.) The only way anything important ever got done was because somebody got up out of their chair -- or planted their ass in their chair, depends on what the thing in question is -- and did it. Here endeth the lesson.

But I still wonder what lessons people are learning.

Comments

[coyotenefarious.livejournal.com]

The only way anything important ever got done was because somebody got up out of their chair -- or planted their ass in their chair, depends on what the thing in question is -- and did it. Here endeth the lesson.

So true. Unfortunately when I get depressed I lose that drive to push forward, get nothing done, and then just get more depressed that I got nothing done.

Oh and I loved My Side of the Mountain. I wanted to be that kid.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately when I get depressed I lose that drive to push forward, get nothing done, and then just get more depressed that I got nothing done.

Yeah, I have that happen too, though it's a situational thing; I imagine for someone with chronic depression it's harder to bust out of the rut. I think for me it sometimes turns into a case of "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"; I've packed up a former life and abandoned it except for the friends I'd made there two and a half times now, so saying "right, just going to ignore everything that's gone before and start over" is starting to become a habit.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I had to come back from the dead for this one: I suspect that I had dealings with the "Rainbow" from Mr. Di Filippo's article. Specifically, if she's the bowhead editor I dealt with back in 1993, she was the character who called me six and seven times a day for about three weeks in her attempts to snag a copy of Squashed Armadillocon for review, and when I asked if she was really planning to review it instead of just snagging a freebie, she swore that the review would be in the September issue. (Naturally, when the review didn't show up for another six months past that, I decided to ask to see if the review was ever going to run, and was told by her boss that they weren't going to bother because, well, the book had been out for nine months at that time, and it wasn't new any more. When I pointed out that the book was new when I sent "Rainbow" the copy she was begging for, he hung up on me. (The reason why I suspect that "Rainbow" was this editor was that she'd never even heard of Science Fiction Eye until I mentioned that Bruce Sterling wrote one of the regular columns; Steve Brown claimed that he constantly sent in copies, but it only got reviewed at the end of '93 because I personally sent a copy out of my contributor's copies to the little ditz. All I got for my trouble was repeated calls from some poor secretary at CBS: her boss apparently wanted a subscription but was too inarticulate to express his need, so he had the poor secretary try to call Brown over and over. When she couldn't find Steve's phone number, she started tracking down the phone numbers of the other contributors, and I was the first one who answered.)

A pox upon all their houses. While I'm certain that all of the crackheads mentioned in that article are long-gone (I understand that Conde Nast had a pretty thorough housecleaning when they took over Wired), they're probably still stinking up other publications unless they were taken out back and shot. Either way, it's just more confirmation that my quitting writing was The Right Decision, because I'm building up more of an allergy to self-important twits than I had during the dotcom boom.