cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am so close give me *something*. I've been driving for Grubhub for the last three days. What the fuck? My editor at SP!N was supposed to give me an update on Friday about what the fuck is happening with the freelancer budget and the $3k worth of assignments that I either do or do not have. I'm sitting on a stack of feature ideas that are awesome. I don't want to have to start from scratch again, pitching editors I don't know. I have this one who thinks I'm the key to reinventing his magazine. I had this TV show that I spent most of a year working on. "F00d F1ghts." Investigating foods which have multiple inventions credited. I did a bunch of stories about this type of thing for Sm1thsonian and Thr1llist. A TV production company wanted to turn it into a show. I spent six months writing thirteen episodes and doing all of the research. The chosen host was R0y Choi, liked that a guy from Smithsonian was the writer. It was smart and scholarly and tight. The night before the pilot was supposed to be filmed, the head of the production company sent out an email including Roy, which suggested the stupid idea that Roy wear a blindfold and do a taste test at the end of every episode. Of course Roy said, 'what the fuck?' and backed out. We had shooting permits and everything lined up and he just walked away over that stupid gimmick that some dipshit tried to tack on to a smart, well-researched show. That was probably at least $100k and a career in TV development torpedoed. Anyway, I've had the thought today that this could be revived as a column or a blog for some vertical. Maybe for SP1N, maybe somewhere else. My son mentioned a restaurant in Massachusetts that claims to have invented the fr1ed clam. W00dman's. I've been there when I was a kid. I spent less than one minute before I completely busted them. I did my hot kung fu using periodical archives to find mentions as early as 1847. They claimed, defensively, in an interview with the B0ston Gl0be a few years ago that perhaps there were fr1ed clams before 1916 but they were the first to bread them and deep fry them rather than pan-frying them. So I dug into recipes in periodicals prior to 1916. Everyone was deep-frying them in lard since at least the 1870's. And they were breaded. In cracker crumbs, in corn meal, in flour. And fr1ed clams were a ubiquitous part of life near the water in New England for decades before the supposed invention in 1916. W00dman's story about their invention makes no sense even on the face of it. That a local fisherman suggested frying clams facetiously, and then they had the brilliant idea of shucking them first. People were eating these things by the bushel for probably 70 years before their supposed "invention." The whole story about the invention is just absurd on the face of this. Anyway, I have dozens of these. I've done this with l0bster N3wburg, Long Island Ice Tea, the Buffalo wing. This should be a bi-weekly feature on Vox or V1ce or perhaps SP!N, or maybe something I haven't thought of. I am really, *really* fucking good at this type of research. And I hope that there are other people who find this kind of shit interesting. This should be a series on a high-traffic vertical that pays at least a thousand dollars eaches. I should be able to pay most of my bills writing this shit. Instead, I'm driving for Grubhub for the last three days. Subtracting the gas and wear on the car, this is bullshit. You cannot make a living doing this. I've done the most substantial examinations of the machinations of the Tweed Ring in the last ten years. I wrote the book that shows exactly how power was created, bought and sold in New York City for over a hundred years. And I still have to actually buckle down and rewrite the first 50 pages of it. I can't fucking face it. I don't really know how to restructure 60 years of history in order to open with action and turn a book that is mostly about violence and corruption into a book that opens with violence and corruption in an intellectually honest way. Doing this Grubhub shit just erases any thought of re-working the book. There is the awesome agent who wrote me that she thinks this could be great and sellable to a big five publisher if I re-work some shit, and then she has ghosted me for the last three weeks or whatever since I responded to her. This book needs a re-write of the first few chapters to be turned into a best-seller. I just need a few actually solid assignments, or a series from a vertical, or SOMETHING to pay the bills for a month ahead. 1:48 a.m. - 2023-05-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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