cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are plenty of lawyers. There's only one of me. I had a two and a half hour phone conversation with the new features editor at Sp1n Magazine. While I was out fishing. I watched very eatable bass cruise the shallows for hours as the sun moved ever downward and I did not have two hands free to handle a rod and reel. This guy is Australian and has had quite a career, war correspondent and all. He wanted to tell me his whole story and to take my measurements. He didn't know much about me. He asked where I was, and I said "on the R1vanna River in Ch@rlottesville, Virginia," and of course he asked about the riot. And yes, I was there for that, and for everything that preceded it, and I made a feature documentary film about it, and I spent a year after that covering riots and rallies around the eastern US and investigating wh1te supremacist groups. So then I was in his club of embitterned, hard-core journalists who have been through Serious Shit and been teargassed and stalked and had people try to kill us. He spent a long time talking about one of his books, about an Australian bank robber who escaped from prison often and wore T shirts promoting himself while he was on the run. And then I, in turn, was supposed to talk about my own books. Traveling around the US, hunting for inv@sive species, and then doing years of historical research for my current book. Covering big trials. Making an acclaimed documentary film, fucking around in TV for a while. Being embedded in a university research lab. Working in quantum computing. It was a lot of ass-sniffing. I guess that this guy is surrounded by a lot of fucking idiots who came out of collegiate communications programs and don't know shit about anything. He wants a few people who can do really hard-core, prestige journalism that puts SP1N back on the map. He wants me to be the guy that does that. I actually can do that, but I need to get fucking paid for real. No $500 for a story that takes two weeks and four interviews. Give me $3,000 for a feature that I dig into and spend 60 hours on. Better yet, put me on the payroll for $80k a year as a staff writer or "contributing editor." So say that I do this story on B1g Lurch, traveling to Compton, CA, to get all of the court records, and then it blows up on social media because nobody has found anything new on B1g Lurch in decades. That's the bet here. That I do this particular story and it will be a big deal and then I can get a couple of $3k assignments a month. And that helps my hoped-for book deal. It's honestly selling myself short. I know what I'm worth working in quantum. Here I am doing this Rocky 5 thing where I'm getting back in the ring as a freelance journalist at this point in my career and why? I just can't stay away. I *want* that moment when they talk about something I wrote on All Things Considered. I want to put my ideas and stories back into mainstream culture. I've written things that Rachael Maddow and Seth Meyers talked about in their monologues. How I cover the costs of this LA trip to gather the court documents of B1g Lurch before reimbursement from Sp1n, I have no fucking idea. I am rapidly running out of money. Like, if I still have two and a half grand I'd be pleased. But fuck, I want the accolades and criticism and overall kerfufle of a big story almost as much as Matt at Sp1n wants it. This guy might think that there are multiple people he can hire to do this. Sp1n could decide to hire a lawyer to be their chief counsel, and within two weeks they could easily have someone who can do the job just fine at $175k a year. If they wanted to hire someone who can write the range of science and civil rights features that I've done, they'd have to keep the position open for months and wouldn't have anyone who could step into a riot or critique a paper on de-extinction. There are plenty of lawyers. There's only one of me. Hopefully that's worth something. 3:41 a.m. - 2023-04-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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