Writing for mags like The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, etc.

[In Exile]

Luck is huge, but what looks like luck from the outside often looks different when it happens to you.  I was "lucky" when the first story I ever pitched to a magazine - without any bylines ever before - was bought, but if I hadn't pitched it, and hadn't cared enough to learn how to do so, and hadn't been stupid enough to think I could do so without bylines, and hadn't been arrogant enough to think that I could write as well as those I read, then "luck" never would have happened.  I was "lucky" to land my first first book contract without an agent, but once again, I'd learned how to write a proposal and been turned down more than one hundred times.  I was "lucky" when that book did well, and - well, you get the idea.

Luck is when your talent, focus, timing, and hard work come together for an instant after a lifetime of working different sides of the room. And remember, you never "arrive" in this business.  Every time you kick down one door, there is another one.

[Ben_Hecht]

I don't post very much, but I'm on here a ton.

This is the best thread ever.

Marvelous, isn't it?

[Billy Pritchard]

I don't post very much, but I'm on here a ton.

This is the best thread ever.

Marvelous, isn't it?

I read here every day with one hope -- threads like this.

[JayFarrar]

Luck plays a huge part.
I got a freelance gig for a magazine because I waste so much time here.
They liked what I did, and would keep me in mind for more work.
Got another call asking for work from another outlet and that has mushroomed into even more work. The first magazine sent word that they'll be looking for more from me.
I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Jones, JG, Charlie Pierce, those guys. I'll never be in their weight class. And I know that.
I'm okay with it.
But since a little luck has come my way. I make a little money. Pay my bills and have a helluva good time.

[funky_mountain]

this is probably a nice time for someone more skilled at searching the site than i to dig up doubledown's eloquent post that doesn't makes us seem like failures in the midst of jgmacg and jones and all the other great writers who post here. maybe dd can help us out when he finds this thread.

[buckweaver]

Because like Frank_Ridgeway's clothes, this post never, ever goes out of style:

• Post of the Year: Double Down's creed on young writers:

Try to remember this: It's all relative.

Right now, somewhere, maybe even lurking on SJ.com, there is a college kid who is bummed because he or she doesn't think they're a very good writer. They're realizing they're not going to land a coveted intership at a major metro, get praised as an 'effing stud, and will have to settle for something smaller, like a 50,000 cirq paper in Texas.

At that same major metro I just mentioned, there is a young, aspring preps reporter who is bummed out because, at 24, he thinks he's not a very good writer. He's done some quality stuff, but there is already a kid at the paper who is covering the NFL beat at 25, and getting praised every day on SJ.com.

The NFL beat reporter works hard, writes good features, even wins a few awards, but he's convinced his writing isn't as good as a friend of his. She is a takeout writer who breezed through a year as a beat writer before she was promoted to do big picture, award-winning, long-form narrative stuff. When he reads her artful sentences, it makes him want to pull his hair out.

The takeout writer can turn a phrase, construct a tearjerker, but privately she's devastated because she really wants to write for a magazine, and when she reads the stuff in Esquire or Sports Illustrated or the New Yorker, it breaks her heart because she knows she's just not that good. She's done some stuff people tell her is excellent, but it's never made it into BASW, and now she wonders if she ever will. She's sent her clips to a few magazines, but she never hears back, and that only confirms her worst fears.

Over at SI, there is a young staffer who is churning out stories and doing some major take-outs. But he's not Rick Reilly or Gary Smith or Frank Deford, and everyone knows it. No one has to tell him either; he understands it in his heart. And so every time he looks at his copy, he feels like a failure. Why can't he write like THAT!!?? How in the world do they do that? I grew up reading Reilly and now I feel like a phony, he thinks.

Higher up on the masthead and the payscale at SI, there is a senior staffer who has been there for years and years, has won some major awards, and while he' not quite Reilly or Gary Smith, he's one of the best in the country, universally respected, and has been in BASW multiple times. But when he picks up books by Tim O'Brien, or Philip Roth, or Cormac McCarthy, or some of the best writers of his generation, he feels like a fraud. What happened, he thinks to himself. In college, I always dreamed of writing like that, and all I do is write about men who swing sticks at baseballs. There's no poetry in that, no transcendence.

Down in Texas, bottle in his hand, Tim O'Brien sits around, depressed, quietly devastated by the fact that he never quite became Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or even, arguably, Philip Roth.

Across the street from O'Brien, there is a kid who is passionate about writing, wants to write about sports for a living, but worries he's not quite good enough. It's a long shot, but he applied for a job covering preps at a 50,000 cirq paper. Instead, some guy who went to a better college and had a previous internship got it after he was turned down by a major metro. The kid who lives across the street from O'Brien is pretty certain he's not as good as the guy who was hired at the 50,000 cirq paper, but he'll get that good someday. He hopes.

For now, he'll take a job at an 18,000 cirq. weekly. He beat out 40 other applicants for the job.

Because, his new boss tells him, he was the best writer who applied.

You can beat yourself up pretty easily when you agonize over the words on your screen. But one of the best writers I know told me not that long ago, "I'm always 10 years away from being the writer I want to be. I'll feel that way 10 years from now."

I read his stuff, and I want to weep, it's so good. It makes me, in some ways, want to give up writing for a living. He reads his own stuff and thinks, "It's not that good, not as good as I want it to be. A.J. Leibling would have done it better."

If you feel like your stuff sucks, don't worry. Most people do. Don't beat yourself up too much, just critique it, or ask someone else to critique it, and vow to get a little bit better each story.

[Dickens Cider]

I'm still convinced that's the best thing that's ever been posted here.

Jgmacg's 40 Theses is my favorite non-journalism post.

[Moderator1]

OK, for starters, let's go back to Page 1. Jones, don't oversell your ability.
This is one fat, old, bald guy who wouldn't cough up more than five bucks.


But, seriously folks, people with tons more talent than I'll ever have already said qlenty of good stuff.  Let me reinforce some of it.   Twenty years ago, I went to a seminar and a sports editor - Mike McKenzie I think his name was - gave some simple advice that I use today.

Words won't bail you out. Material will. Work harder than the next guy. Get more than the next guy.

Jones' talent ain't shit without his work ethic.  Take that "most gripping" story in Esquire this year that was, indeed, the most gripping.  Shit-tons and shit-tons and shit-tons of work went into that.  He had incredible material, gobs and gobs of incredible material.  And the talent to pull it all together.  Which he did quite well.
Without the material, he ain't got shit except my five bucks.

My kid is pretty bright. I told him forever:  Your intelligence doesn't do a thing for you. You need the D word - diligence.  Once he figured that out and combined that diligence with his intelligence, he started kicking ass.

Work your ass off.  People WILL notice.  Then work even harder.

[Ch.B]

I know it’s presumptuous for the new guy to be doing anything more than grabbing a round of cold ones and dispensing them to the SJ.Com elders, but I’m going to give it a go anyway…

On the topic of talent, by whatever definition:

Some years ago, I spent the better part of two days deconstructing Jeff MacGregor’s brilliant SI piece on rattlesnakes from 1998. If you haven’t read it, the link is here: http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1013432/index.htm

I tried to work backward, from envisioning his structure to his reporting to his brainstorming. And, for the most part, I understood how he did it. Except for the writing. I could spend a month on a sentence and not be able to construct one as simultaneously funny, knowing and informative. Take, for example, his intro to the meat of the piece:

Picture the Rattlesnake Derby as sort of a county fair grafted onto a giant flea market next to a carnival midway, all of it operating contemporaneous to and under the auspices of what amounts to a potentially deadly bass-fishing tournament.

You can’t diagram that kind of writing. And you certainly can’t mimic it.

Not that I didn’t try, of course. For a good six months, every story I wrote for my place of employ went through a draft or two where it read like really bad MacGregor. Profile of an NBA player? Why not start the feature with a winding, kinetic scene lede designed to be both comic and insanely descriptive. That went about as well as you’d imagine.

My conclusion, naturally, was that I was screwed. I couldn’t write like MacGregor - or David Foster Wallace or Steve Rushin, for that matter. Ergo, there must be a cap on my ‘talent,’ and therefore on the quality of my writing.

Since then, I’ve come to the realization – probably obvious to others, but it wasn’t to me – that I bet Steve Rushin can’t write like Jeff MacGregor either. And in turn, MacGregor probably can’t write like Charlie Pierce. That’s what makes all of them so good; they have a unique voice. And perhaps, just perhaps, I should spend less time trying to write like MacGregor or Pierce and more time trying to write like, well, me.

This is not to say you can’t learn a ton from studying these other writers, and trying out their styles. I certainly did. But in the end, it’s your voice that matters. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping. 

[wicked]

I've had very little success in this business over a fair amount of time, but enough to keep me coming back for more, and my firm belief is that it all comes down to self-confidence.

Don't believe in your work or yourself, and you never even have to read this thread.

Keep knocking. On a lot of doors. Until someone says yes.

And work like a bulldog, too.

[21]

Jones' talent ain't shit without his work ethic.  Take that 2mort gripping" story in Esquire this year that was, indeed, the most gripping.  Shit-tons and shit-tons and shit-tons of work went into that.  He had incredible material, gobs and gobs of incredible material.  And the talent to pull it all together.  Which he did quite well.
Without the material, he ain't got shit except my five bucks.

This is one of the most important messages on the thread.

It's one thing to be able to write. It's quite another to know WHAT to write. Finding the one guy who takes your tale to another level, seeing the fine detail that screams out to you but sits silent to everyone else.  It takes a relentless work ethic and an immersion so complete you can't even comprehend it until you're deep within and have no idea how to get out, alive or otherwise.

Six months after the story has been in print, you're still waking up in the middle of the night thinking of one more interview you should have done? Congratulations, you're doing something right. 

[Jones]

Ch. B:

Rattlesnake. The mutha white meat.

Well, shit. That's tough to trump.

And you're right -- trying to imitate a good writer is the quickest way to sack yourself on a fencepost. When I started at Esquire, I was so conscious of occupying the space formerly occupied by Charlie Pierce that I tried to write like him. That lasted two or three stories until my editor called me up and said, Quit trying to write like Charlie Pierce. We hired you to write like you.

It was good to get called on my bullshit like that. And while I think I'm still trying to find my "voice," one of the things I like best about writing for magazines is, getting the opportunity to look for it. A good magazine will want its readers to know who they're reading without looking at the byline. That should be every writer's goal, so long as it doesn't mean resorting to gimmicks and barf.

That being said, I still believe that writers can learn a lot and can develop their own gifts by reading other writers -- the best of the best. It's a good exercise to try to unlock the secrets of another man's talent. How does he do it? Break down the pace, the rhythm, the language. Don't try to copy it, but maybe there's a hidden backbeat you can steal to prop up your own jazz.

P.S.: Moddy and 21 are right. Material makes a story. There's no better feeling in the world than sitting down at your desk and knowing you could write 10,000 words without an ounce of fat in them.

[buckweaver]

P.S.: Moddy and 21 are right. Material makes a story. There's no better feeling in the world than sitting down at your desk and knowing you could write 10,000 words without an ounce of fat in them.

Couldn't agree more.

Slight threadjack: I once corresponded with a well-established, well-respected writer about a throwaway column he had written in which I questioned the veracity of some of his (quite original) anecdotes. I wanted to use them in a piece I was writing, and ask him some questions about it. He politely declined to expand on the stories, but after a little more pushing on my part, he finally replied. "Sorry," he told me, "everything I know went into the piece. And all my sources are now deceased."

I'm not very old, but I do know for just about everything good that I've written -- I've had about 10 more pages' worth of material that were left on the cutting room floor than what I used in the piece. It was a column that shouldn't have been written. He didn't have the material.

Fantastic writer, who enjoyed a great career in newspapers twice as long as I've been alive. But if you don't have the material ... it doesn't matter how good a writer you are.

Anyway, back to the regularly scheduled programming ...

[Piotr Rasputin]

Whenever these threads are started, people always say "Man, this is depressing. I could never be as good as (fill in the blank.)" And the responses come that if you work your tail off, learn constantly, position yourself, and yes, find or create an opportunity (often known as "being in the right place at the right time"), and perhaps make a connection with the right person, good things can happen for you. All true, as many of us have found. And as many will find.

But these days, I find these threads depressing for other reasons, illustrated by these two back-to-back posts from page One:

In the mid to late 1980s I was doing a great deal of magazine work - small time national and big time regional - when that recession hit.  It took a few months, but once the water started running down the drain there was no stopping it, and I went from selling every idea I had to selling none of them in about six months.  When magazine pages (meaning ad pages) start to drop, so do most freelance opportunities - my money maker went from 400 pages plus to barely one hundred in less than a year, and when they rebounded a few years later it was with an entirely new, stripped down staff that didn't want anything to do with me or my kind of work.  Look for that to happen beginning in the post-December issues.  Book publishing is already getting tight, too.  All they want are blockbusters or low advance gambles.  Some big imprints will disappear in the next 6-12 months.  Gonna be a rough few years as a freelancer, because of you are under fifty you have probably not experienced what is about to come.

Your sentences have to be even better than before.

On a much, much, MUCH smaller scale, the same thing happened to me when the bottom fell out of everything (online and print) for a short time earlier this decade.

You can do everything right and still end up on the outside looking in. Which kinda sums up this whole racket.

There are always so many great words written in these threads, so much great information and tales of people using hard work and an ability to greatly hone their own talent to rise to an impact position. But they often sound like veterans recalling a bygone - or soon to be bygone - era while the young and hopeful listen at their feet, feeling they will rise above the current realities of what we do. And maybe they will.

I know, I know. I spoiled the party. Sorry.

[BYH]

I filed a couple team capsules once to one of the magazines I was freelancing for and a couple hours later the editor called me to verify a fact, at the end of the call he said.

"Great job on the capsules."

I laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"How do you do a great job on team capsules?"

"You file on time, the copy is clean, and you didn't act like an asshole when I called you to verify something."

I got a lot of work from that editor.

I had a similiar experience with a front-of-magazine piece for a mid-level title. It was supposed to be a feature and I filed a Q&A, or vice versa. The editor calls me up and says hey, sorry, I think we had a mix-up, you're supposed to do a Q&A instead, can you get it to me?

I say sure, go to work on it and send it in an hour later. She calls me back and gushes about how quickly I'd sent it in and how good it was and how she didn't expect it anytime in the next couple days. To me, it was no big deal, but like you, I got a lot more work out of it.

[Smasher_Sloan]

If you're going to pitch something to the elite magazines, make sure you have a great story, and the ability to convince the editors that you can tell it better than anyone else.

[SixToe]

I say sure, go to work on it and send it in an hour later. She calls me back and gushes about how quickly I'd sent it in and how good it was and how she didn't expect it anytime in the next couple days. To me, it was no big deal, but like you, I got a lot more work out of it.

I have had similar experiences with editors who think their request will take three or four days, or maybe a week.

When I tell them I'll have it later in the day or the next day, they get all giddy. The pieces aren't 10,000 words. They're 800 or 1,000 and don't require moving heaven and earth. It's not Pulitzer material but it fills their needs and they have it quickly.

An editor called once and asked if I could turn around a 2,500-word piece in three weeks, sort of a capsule-type article that took a few phone calls. He apologized and said they would pay full rate plus half again for the short notice. That was wonderful. He got the copy with a week to spare, asked for a couple of clarifications and my check arrived a couple of weeks later.

[BYH]

Whenever these threads are started, people always say "Man, this is depressing. I could never be as good as (fill in the blank.)" And the responses come that if you work your tail off, learn constantly, position yourself, and yes, find or create an opportunity (often known as "being in the right place at the right time"), and perhaps make a connection with the right person, good things can happen for you. All true, as many of us have found. And as many will find.

But these days, I find these threads depressing for other reasons, illustrated by these two back-to-back posts from page One:

In the mid to late 1980s I was doing a great deal of magazine work - small time national and big time regional - when that recession hit.  It took a few months, but once the water started running down the drain there was no stopping it, and I went from selling every idea I had to selling none of them in about six months.  When magazine pages (meaning ad pages) start to drop, so do most freelance opportunities - my money maker went from 400 pages plus to barely one hundred in less than a year, and when they rebounded a few years later it was with an entirely new, stripped down staff that didn't want anything to do with me or my kind of work.  Look for that to happen beginning in the post-December issues.  Book publishing is already getting tight, too.  All they want are blockbusters or low advance gambles.  Some big imprints will disappear in the next 6-12 months.  Gonna be a rough few years as a freelancer, because of you are under fifty you have probably not experienced what is about to come.

Your sentences have to be even better than before.

On a much, much, MUCH smaller scale, the same thing happened to me when the bottom fell out of everything (online and print) for a short time earlier this decade.

You can do everything right and still end up on the outside looking in. Which kinda sums up this whole racket.

There are always so many great words written in these threads, so much great information and tales of people using hard work and an ability to greatly hone their own talent to rise to an impact position. But they often sound like veterans recalling a bygone - or soon to be bygone - era while the young and hopeful listen at their feet, feeling they will rise above the current realities of what we do. And maybe they will.

I know, I know. I spoiled the party. Sorry.

It's OK. I was tempted to ask/say the same thing in the post you quoted.

I did want to ask In Exile and the other vets if they think the freelancing opportunities will ever come back...even a little. I don't expect to ever enjoy a period like I did in 1999-2000, when I freelanced full-time and made more than twice as much as I did at my previous F/T job. It's disappointing and depressing so I don't think about it.

But even when things were going fairly well in the middle of this decade, I lost most of the freelance opps I had b/c the publications nuked sports, or went entirely in-house, or went in the proverbial different direction, or just stopped spending money. I don't think I did anything wrong and I lost chunks of change anyway.

If I was smart, I'd do something else.

[In Exile]

Of course opportunity returned, and I think it will again, perhaps in a different form.  Just because the market dried up didn't mean I stopped writing, and I found other outlets.  Were I a young writer today, I wouldn't take any of this as depressing.  In many ways down times shake out those who need to be shaken out, and leave more opportunity after, forcing us all to be more flexible and more creative, and leaving some room for the next generation, those who burn to write against all odds and have bet everything on their nerve, who stay up all night like I did, for the better part of a week, writing that first story to the exclusion of everything else and lost two notches on my belt as a result.  Then worked fulltime doing something else entirely yet still wrote damn near full time for most of a decade.  Up at four a.m. to write for three or four hours before work, using lunch and break time to do interviews or research, then rewind and erase each night and start again in the morning.  That was me, and I bet at various times it was jones and jmacg and charlie pierce and just about anyone recognizable you could cite.  That's generally the difference, right there.  Not the genealogy.  Not the degree.  Not the trust fund.

When my magazine market dried up, I spent my energy writing book proposals.  They didn't sell, and garnered those 100+ rejections as this stupid novice kept throwing up prayers through the transom.   Did I waste my time?  But I eventually did get a deal for a project, a work for hire partnering with someone else, and kept going.  Ten years later I repackaged about three proposals into one, sold it, and have done several more books in the same vein.  It sold, and ten years later is still selling, and built the house I live in.

If you want a career, yeah, maybe do something else.  But I wasn't looking for a career or for money when I started sitting at the keyboard.  I was looking for a way to look at myself in the mirror and not think I was wasting my time doing stuff I hated for reasons I didn't respect.  The career found me.

All we have is our work.

[friend of the friendless]

Sirs, Madames,

Outside the normal sports pubs I've written for the Canadian outfits that are the national analogues of the mags mentioned here, which would be like, say, Texas Monthly, South (I remember friom years back, is it still around) or other regional or city mags. What was true here was true of my sports gigs and a point alluded to a few posts ago: You get your best breaks with your best stories. I was lucky to walk in off the street with a story that ESPN The Mag liked and that I owned (nobody else was even close to knowing about). That was the start of a beautiful friendship more than five years ago. In contrast, sigh, 22 years ago I got an assignment from SI to do a 1500-word featute--I thought at the time it was pretty good but it ended up getting killed, so I was wrong. No second bite at the apple, though, the truth, I was too discouraged to really take much of a run at it. The bottom line: I don't believe that you should try to work your way into a mag by sending in ideas for the front of the book, small stuff, etc. If you start there, it's likely that you'll be typecast as exactly that and nothing more.

Any success in Canada or at ESPN (and by that I mean a standing relationship with a publication) started with a strong story as an ice-breaker. Any ice-breaker was followed by the development of a working relationship with an editor and some very casual networking in the office. There are some difficulties in being off-site and out of town, some advantages to be able to drop into the office. The former is transcended by a strong story and the latter is worthless without one.

YD&OHS, etc

[jgmacg]

I'll ditto what IE has said this morning. The old institutions are crumbling as the ground falls away beneath us. But destruction means creation, and as many businesses and futures as the internet revolution might foreclose, it will create an equal  -  or greater  -  number of opportunities for those strong and determined enough to survive the transition. It's worth remembering that while the act of storytelling has been a constant in our species, writing for a living has always been a tough racket.

That said, this is indeed a challenging age, and there's a palpable sadness in a lot of the posts here. These I take to be the regrets of younger writers who feel they've missed something.

So here's a quick story about dreams and disappointments and the inexorable grinding motherfucker of time and change.

It took me too many years to get to Paris. I was 50 before I walked through it. But that city and everything it stood for has been vivid in my heart and in my mind from the time I was a little kid. As it is for many of us, Paris was almost entirely a creation of my own imagination, a fantasy capital for the writers I most admired and the poets and artists of every generation.

A few nights before my wife and I went there at last, we had dinner with some very old friends. One of whom is a writer now in his late 60s.

Coming off his Stegner fellowship at Stanford forty-five years ago this friend and mentor, now a great gray-bearded American novelist, had moved to Paris. He and his wife, young and penniless, had lived in a single coldwater room above the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore on the Rue de la Bucherie while he wrestled his first novel. George Whitman, the owner, had invited them to stay there free as a gesture of literary generosity and good heartedness. Thus my friends slept and worked in a simple whitewashed room bounded by dark medieval beams on the third floor. Out their window was a view of Notre Dame and the Seine beyond the treetops. They scraped by on a few francs a week, enough to buy wine and bread and foul Turkish cigarettes. All of which seemed to me impossibly romantic and beautiful.

At dinner that night, my friend asked us please to revisit that place when we got to Paris, to see how it had changed. We did so. It had changed not at all. But as I stood in that tiny room, I was overwhelmed by a wave of heartbreaking regret. I looked out the same window my friend had looked out of nearly half a century before and was reminded that I would never be a young novelist working and starving in a soft-focus, technicolor Paris. I had missed it. Overtaken by such powerful disappointment, I could have cried.

When we came home, I told my friend as much.

To my surprise, he told me he'd spent his year there feeling much the same way. That whenever he turned a corner, or took a sidewalk table at the Deux Magots, he was overcome by sick regret at having missed the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein. The Paris of nearly a half century before, of 1920, of the Lost Generation. Of his imagination. He had missed it.

"You can never have the Paris you imagined for yourself,"  he said to me. "You can only mourn it. You have to learn to love the Paris under your feet."

Seems to me this is true of our careers as well, that we can never have things as we imagine them to have been for those who came before us. We can only ever have our own work in our own moment, however flawed and hard and colorless that present moment seems to be.

To regret too much an age long gone, to miss simpler times that never were, to pine for the days of Rice or Heinz or Liebling, of Sherrod and Laguerre, of the Saturday Evening Post or the New York Herald-Tribune, is to disregard the Paris beneath our feet.

[Inky_Wretch]

"You can never have the Paris you imagined for yourself,"  he said to me. "You can only mourn it. You have to learn to love the Paris under your feet."

Yet another sig-worthy bit on a thread full of them.

[SixToe]

Coming off his Stegner fellowship at Stanford forty-five years ago this friend and mentor, now a great gray-bearded American novelist, had moved to Paris. He and his wife, young and penniless, had lived in a single coldwater room above the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore on the Rue de la Bucherie while he wrestled his first novel. George Whitman, the owner, had invited them to stay there free as a gesture of literary generosity and good heartedness. Thus my friends slept and worked in a simple whitewashed room bounded by dark medieval beams on the third floor. Out their window was a view of Notre Dame and the Seine beyond the treetops. They scraped by on a few francs a week, enough to buy wine and bread and foul Turkish cigarettes. All of which seemed to me impossibly romantic and beautiful.

At dinner that night, my friend asked us please to revisit that place when we got to Paris, to see how it had changed. We did so. It had changed not at all. But as I stood in that tiny room, I was overwhelmed by a wave of heartbreaking regret. I looked out the same window my friend had looked out of nearly half a century before and was reminded that I would never be a young novelist working and starving in a soft-focus, technicolor Paris. I had missed it. Overtaken by such powerful disappointment, I could have cried.

If this is from the top of your head, I'm contemplating sticking my hands in the blender.



 

[Jones]

lono, you got that work all on your own.

And "The Paris Beneath Our Feet" is a fabulous book title. (And that was a fabulous post, jgmacg.) I think writers, especially, yearn for other times -- they always seem cooler, quainter, hipper, more romantic, especially between the covers of a battered paperback. But there's something to be said for living in an age that's anti-romantic. You have no one to answer to but yourself.

[jgmacg]

If this is from the top of your head, I'm contemplating sticking my hands in the blender.

If the blender's out, how about we just have some daiquiris instead? The Jones enjoys a daiquiri.