cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Levelling Up I didn't intend to be a journalist. At least as an adult, I never set out to choose this. All along, I wrote. When I was in high school I imagined myself as a professional writer. I remember while I was an intern for The C-v1lle Weekly I would walk past this used Saab dealership on Preston Avenue in Charl0ttesville on my way from Murr@y High School to the C-ville's offices and I imagined the outline of a life as a journalist. I would drive a Saab and carry a briefcase. It seemed like a respectable car. I perused books in the non-fiction section of the public library and read them at random. Autobiographies of Abbie Hoffman, Wavy Gravy and diver Bill Royal. I listened to Andre Codrescu's radio essays. They told their stories and I took their right to tell those stories and to be heard at face value. I spent a lot of time writing. I filled dozens of notebooks. All non-fiction. Whatever was going on my life, things that I saw. Those are all still stuffed in boxes and I have them yet. Haven't looked at any of them in 20 years. College wasn't a wash but it didn't get me anywhere as a writer. I learned a lot from certain classes. History and historiography classes in particular have served me well. A cultural geography class stands out. My gilded age literature classes have done something for me. I went on the run for a while as a student at Hampsh1re C0llege, a friend of wanted hackers, and slept under the desk of “Emmanuel Goldstein,” who had on that desk a photograph of himself handcuffed to Abbie Hoffman at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. After college I spent 11 years working with my father as a wholesale insurance broker. During that time I continued to write. I made an account on an online diary website. For much of that time I wrote about 10,000 words a week. I collected a few hundred followers. It was for the best that I did not inflict myself on the world at large before I had anything useful to say. After watching an interview with the economist, Hernando DeSoto, I was instantly enamored of his ideas. I bought his book immediately and spent about two years reading economics. I started with a reading list from MIT's economics program. My studies were unusual by modern standards. I read a lot of classical economists. Smith, Marx, Keynes. Also Milton Friedman and Mancur Olsen, who made a really strong impression on me with his book, “The Logic of Collective Action.” Also during this period I studied foreign policy and defense spending. I read books by Henry Kissinger, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. I acquired and read an entire presidential library. I bought every book by a Presidential candidate that I could find from Teddy Roosevelt onward. I picked up back issues of Foreign Policy magazine and Jane's Defense. When the planes hit the World Trade Center, I had recently read an article about the idea of using passenger planes as “an asymmetrical missile threat.” Also I worked on political campaigns. First as an envelope-stuffer and then as a strategist, advisor and speech-writer. I crafted messages and chose language for campaigns for City Council, the House of Delegates, Congress and the Senate to use. I didn't get paid for it, but I wrote. The blog came sort of late, when I stop to think about it. I started writing a blog under my real name and gathered an audience pretty quickly. This time it was thousands of readers. I wrote about biology, guns, foreign policy and politics. I was invited to join a joint Democratic and Republican blog called “The Richmond War Room.” Looking at our traffic, we had readers from the (Bush) White House every day. I am fucking bored with talking about how my blog turned into a big deal. The New York Times came and did their big story about me and my deer classes. I was on the front page for Thanksgiving. My whole career is built on that. I landed my first book deal because I had a book proposal ready to go when the article about me ran. At the same time, I signed my first shitty TV deal with “Digital Ranch Productions.” Digital Ranch was a shit outfit that signed anyone who became the slightest bit prominent, just in case that deal became even more valuable. The owner never did the slightest bit of work to sell a show with me, but the simple fact of being signed to a TV development deal did wonders for getting publishers and promoters to redouble their efforts. Before “The Beginners Guide to Hunting Deer for Food” was even finished, I started figuring out what my next move would be. The fuck I was going to spend the rest of my life writing 'how-to' books. Let alone selling insurance. In an instant, I concocted “Eating Aliens.” I could travel around the country or world (depending on the budget) hunting and fishing for invasive species and eating them and writing about it. Literally, I thought of this idea and expressed it to my father at work in the course of about two minutes. This became a Really Big Deal. The simple act of working on this thing was news, again and again. The New York Times did two more stories about me. And I did dozens of interviews for news outlets in the US, Europe and Australia. I became a famous hunter. There is no getting around what my wife began doing to me on New Year's Day. In the morning, in bed, she tearfully admitted to being attracted to women. Which I'd known about since well before we'd gotten engaged when I was 17 years old. But now she was making a pretty big deal about it. After a few nightmarish weeks, she worked out a deal to remain married. Part of the deal involved getting out of the crappy run-down house that we owned on almost 7 acres in Virginia horse country and putting her into a nice, modern house of her choosing. The big problem was that we had bought the existing property with 100,000 worth of equity and now we were in the middle of the horrible housing market collapse that destroyed many a fortune. On that seven acres was a cottage that I had spent the last two years building with my own hands. Literally hammering every nail. It was supposed to be practice for building an entire house that we would spend the rest of our lives in. My dream piece of land, with a house and the almost-finished cottage I had poured myself into for years. I handed it back to the bank as we rented a fine, new house in the middle of nowhere that I know I couldn't afford for long. Her cheating began quickly. I found personals ads on Craig's List where she was looking for women to have affairs with. A lot of different people had contacted me about making documentary films. The stuff that I was doing seemed to beg for it. Locavore hunter, teaching people how to hunt for food, with cooking, and now the whole thing where I was hunting for invasive species. Everyone wanted a piece of it. I said “yes” to almost everything. But in regard to film projects, I had grown wary of wasting time on people who wanted to ask someone else's permission and wait to get going. Helenah stuck out in the midst of that. She was a film student at American University. Helenah wanted to come right away and film something. I said, “yes.” I picked her up at the train station in Charlottesville. She walked from the train wearing a Metallica T shirt. Long blonde hair, pale complexion, and a bag full of camera gear. I wanted her immediately. Helenah decided to make a feature film about me. I admired her willingness to go on the road and start filming without waiting for anyone else's say-so. She rode with me to a speaking gig at the Mother Earth News Fair and over those days we fell in love without saying so. Time passed. My wife declared her intent to leave, while pushing me into Helenah's arms. My wife left and my heart was broken. Helenah became the best friend that I ever had. We traveled around America together even while my life at home collapsed. She won a few Emmys and we attended together. We went to New Orleans and Texas. We talked about films we wanted to make together. About squirrels and bison and sloths and roadrunners. I wrote a lot of big-deal pieces for Slate. I didn't want anything else out of life except to travel with her and to write and to film and wake up to Helenah in the morning and to inhale the scent of her hair as the sun rose. I have written elsewhere about what happened. About the terrible scene in the airport at Heathrow and the ring that I flew to England with in my pocket and how it stayed in my pocket as she was terrible to me after she had been outside of the US for months and turned back into the Scandanavian. Anything after that is an accidental coda. I wanted to die. I still wish that someone had turned me off that day. I lost another home. And another. I had made a reputation as a travel-adventure writer. The New York Times had published a piece I wrote and the editor argued about my byline, saying that I should be listed as a “Nature writer” rather than a “science-writer”. So I spent two years refusing to pitch or publish anything in which I was the star. I write a long series of hard science features for the Washington Post. De-extinction became the theme of my work for The Washington Post. And then I realized what I had been missing. I am not a journalism major. I am not a biology major. I was never a general-assignment journalist for a local paper. And there is no telling what important experience I have missed because of that approach to journalism. The de-extinction stuff was huge. My stuff got syndicated all over the world. I mean, you name any newspaper on Earth and I appeared in it. Hundreds of millions of people read my work. After two years of writing hard science features, I realized that I was missing a few things in my skill set. I skipped past the normal dues that a journalist pays and went right to Slate and the Washington Post. There were skills missing from my toolbelt. Very deliberately, I started writing for a local weekly. Quick turnarounds, courthouse coverage, stories on heroin addicts and illegal immigrants. At the same time, I accepted a contract from Smiths0nian Magazine. They brought me in as a science writer and then started handing me history and art stories. That was about a year ago. I've written a tremendous number of stories for them since that time. Read scientific papers, conducted countless conversations with scientists about the conclusions of those papers. I have done a very lot of original historical research as well. Last month I covered the R0lling St0ne defamation trial for the N3w York Post. And that was sort of my senior thesis. It was a grueling process, but it was also like going through a graduate seminar in journalistic ethics. Ten hour days during which I had to take notes via longhand because phones and laptops were prohibited in the court room. I learned so much from that trial. About how to fuck up and how not to fuck up. Here on the other side of it, I feel like I have graduated. Like this was the culmination of a year of remedial journalism studies. It is time to move to the next level. I keep graduating from one level to the next and it never seems to pay any better. I am about one level away from the most elite level of non-fiction writing. I've written for the New York Times and Smithsonian and the Washington Post. This week I am pitching to R0lling Stone and GQ and the N3w Yorker. The stories I am pitching to all of them are A-level, top-tier things. The pitches are solid and my ability to deliver them is certain. I know, without a doubt, that I can write a piece for any of those publications that anyone would read and figure that this article fits in with the rest of what they have read in those same pages. But motherfuck, the challenge of getting an editor's attention for a green light is one hell of a tough thing. 1:47 a.m. - 2016-11-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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