Blog On The Motorway

It turns out that one huge benefit of making your post a private one is that you get to see exactly who is reading it, because they have to contact you direct and ask you for a password. Which is nice. Thankfully quite a few of you did, and provided me with just the ego-massage that I required. What you didn’t do, by and large, was leave me any helpful comments. If you don’t know what I am talking about then by all mean feel free to email me, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll send you the password. But despite the warming glow of people asking to read something of yours I shall resist the temptation to ask you to do so again, I suspect I’d get far less of a take up than before.

I’ve been feeling a bit more productive again of late, and having pretty much rounded up part one of Blood On The Motorway it’s time to turn back to my normal blogging. Before we go any further let me do a little bit of whoring and point you in the direction of a piece I wrote for Demon Pigeon about Axl Rose and a bit of a moratorium over at the Year of Health. As well as this I’ve taken my first steps into the wider world of trying to get paid for writing things. I’ve signed up to a company called Suite101, which is a site that gets you to write short articles for them and then they pay you a slice of the Google Advertising revenue that you get from the article. On the face of it this is not going to be a particularly lucrative deal, but from what I can tell (and the proof will come if this actually happens for me) but most articles wont pull in more than, say, $1 a month, unless they get really noticed. But that’s not actually that bad when you consider that will be for 12 months. If I can crank out three or four of these articles a week, then it wont be long before I build up enough of a head of steam that the money coming in will be quite nice. It’s never going to be enough to allow me to survive on it (unless I get really lucky on it and have a whopping hit of an article) but it’ll be a nice bit of extra cash.

That is, of course, if it works as advertised. I’m still pretty sceptical about the whole thing, but the way I see it is that if it doesn’t work then I’ve not really lost anything save for a little bit of time. As well as that, it’ll give me an excuse to write some copy that I can then use in a portfolio, and broaden the type of writing I can show around. As much as I love Demon Pigeon, it’s hardly the kind of content that is likely to lead to a job. I really do want to start building up a decent portfolio, and as much as I’ve kept writing in public ever since I left the Asian Express, very little of it is usable for a portfolio, and most of the stuff I can use is about 5 years old, and a lot of that is not really very good. So even if this doesn’t bring in the cash, I can write about whatever I want, so I can use it as an exercise in bulking out my portfolio. But I do hope it does bring in the cash.

But that’s enough shop talk. I know this blog has become a bit of a procrastination station recently, but I really do want to take the whole ‘writing’ thing seriously, and as a result it’s pretty much all I have to talk about. Boooooring.

So what else have I been doing? Not a lot. Yesterday I appear to have agree to another web project, although this one is not particularly labour intensive, should be fun too, and will probably become more popular than anything else. We shall see.

Other than that I have been largely watching the repeats of Mad Men on BBC2 on a Sunday night. It’s divine, even though nothing ever actually happens in it. One of the episodes this week had a plot that actually revolved around some people going for a drink after work, and nothing happened when they did. I am utterly transfixed. I think it’s the world’s most expensive and brilliant screensaver. The real hook in it is the characters, which are brilliantly drawn and very well acted, but have the added bonus that the writers make no effort to ascribe them a goal or obvious motivation. They’re just people, complex and trying to get through the day. Marvellous stuff and I am very happy knowing I still have three and a half series of it at the very least makes me happy. Oh, and talking about the show this much gives me justification to put pic of the lovely Christina Hendricks at the top of this post. Yum.

Other than that I’ve been watching a lot of the Hurricane Katrina docs that have been on to mark the five year anniversary. I’ve only watch the first half of the epic Spike Lee doc ‘When The Levees Broke’ but it’s magnificent, moving, and bewildering. Can’t quite see how it’s going to stretch to four hours though. Oh, and we’ve been watching the original Swedish Wallander, which is excellent but bloody hard work, so much so that watching one episode puts you off watching the next one a bit, even though it’s really enjoyable.

So yeah, it turns out that all I’ve been doing is watching telly. No change there then.