Tag: Business Hat

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One

Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings. Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing. For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Bonus Post: Tuesday Therapy and Some Additional Thoughts on Rights

You may have noticed that there’s a routine building around these parts. Or not, ’cause really, it’s mostly a routine that exists in my head and it’s only been going for, like, a week. In any case, this is a bonus post. As in, something I didn’t intend to write, but I’m going to anyway. I’ve offered some advice about Writing and Tracking Your Rights over on LL Hannetts blog as part of her Tuesday Therapy series. I am, for someone who once made a career of dispensing writing advice in the tertiary sector, remarkably squeamish about the process. I either want to impart everything or nothing, since the wrong piece of advice delivered at the wrong time can be fatal to a developing creative process. I still suffer crippling moments of doubt induced by something I read in Samuel Delany’s About Writing four years ago. It’s not bad advice – it’s remarkably good – but I heard it at the wrong time and

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Transition Periods

It’s weird – the business side of writing always creeps up on me and mugs me while I’m not looking. And it’s not because I never thought I’d need to paying attention to this stuff, just that I always thought the process would move a little slower than it does. Over the last couple of months I’ve had to set up two new spreadsheets in my writing folder. The first, originally set up a few months, is your basic quarterly profit-and-loss data – what’s coming in, what I’m spending, etc. I’d been avoiding doing this for a long while, but the realities of my working situation (heading into a year of long-term unemployment, albeit broken up by some short-term and part-time contracts) have made it necessary if I wish to continue paying rent and avoid some unpleasant conversations with the local social security office. The second spreadsheet, and the most recent to be created, is designed to keep track of