Chris's Invincible Super-Blog

Thursday, August 18, 2005

I Wish I Was This Guy

Originally found on SomethingAwful:

He's got it made.

And he also looks just like Mister Six:

...And that guy's a total badamadeuce.

3 Comments:

Anonymous said...

oh my gosh. so, no really, when are you going to start making cash money, yo?? with your writing you could, i just know it!

8/19/2005 5:52 PM

Chris Sims said...

Interesting story about that, Valerie.

Remember the dotcom boom? I was a part of that. When I was seventeen, I found a website through the Mystery Science Theater 3000 newsletter that most of the cast of the show had been writing humor columns for. At the time, I was doing a lot of writing for my school paper, including all the opinion stuff, and I'd written a treatise on the Confederate Flag issue that was too hot for public school. So I figured what the hey and submitted it to the site.

The editor I contacted actually really liked my work, but they'd just done a piece on that same issue a few days before, so he told me to try something new, and he'd check it out.

So I wrote about a Barbie doll I'd seen an ad for. It was one that had a dress that was also a cake that you could decorate, and it looked for all the world like Barbie was popping out of a cake at Ken's bachelor party. So I wrote 1500-or-so words on it, submitted it, did a few rewrites, worked on editing it with a guy who wrote for MSNBC and a guy who wrote for the Wall Street Journal, and it got put up.

They seemed to like it, and said for being 17, I showed a lot of promise. I was paid $100 for the column.

Did it a few more times, got another "Benjamin" (as the kids say), and then the online mag was bought by a larger company, which then declared bankruptcy in the dotcom crash and defaulted on thousands of dollars owed to contributors, including three or four hundred owed to me.

And that's the story of my brief career as a professional writer, and how it apparently peaked at 17.

8/20/2005 12:46 AM

Mark W. Hale said...