Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by H.K. Pepnxz At sometime everybody wants to be a writer. We've all got a story to tell or there was a moment in time where we saw something and we're certain that no on else saw it in quite that way, and probably no one ever would again.
Its part of our nature to want to tell people about it. We want to communicate. We want to educate, to inform, to titillate and enlighten. Sometimes we just want to hurt.
We want to justify and avenge. Address grievous wrongs. And we want to entertain.
It used to be a lot easier to be a writer. Not to make a living at it but to see stuff on a printed page.
That's important to people. Having a solid thing in your hand that ou can give to loved ones to hold. Its proof in a judgmental world that we exist. If it weren't there wouldn't be all those adverts around for vanity presses.
“See your words typeset and bound in genuine paper for a few grand.” There are a lot of them in business. Money means its got to be important, right?
There used to be the pulps, a cheap magazine. They gave us Hammet and Chandler, and Howard and Lovecraft. The pulps faded away to be replaced by the 25 cent pocketbook and the surprising 35 cent magazine.
Those strange magazines hung on in one form or another. Up through the 70's there were a dozen or so of them that printed genre pieces, fiction, short stories. You have to start in shorts until you learn how to write and to create an effect before you dream up a story or live a story big enough to take up a book.
There was an Alfred Hitchcock Magazine, A Twilight Zone Magazine, Analog and a few more. They paid pennies a word and came out in this phony folio sized format that could be squeezed into racks at the checkout stands of grocery stores.
Eventually those little magazines had to fade away. No more advertising for porn, our snake oils, at least not enough to keep the little magazines going. And who needed 8 mm porn when Playboy was on sale next to the little magazines. Instant gratification always beats anticipation. We are Americans after all.
They were place for guys to write. To be bad and maybe never heard from again or maybe to stick like Jim Thompson, Bloch, Ellison and on and on.
Hell, there were even poetry magazines right out there to buy next to Life and Look, not hidden away like they were a more dangerous kind of porno.
Those little magazines were classy and classless. I've seen the food stained badly typed rejection letters they would send out. They actually read the submissions and would tell you no and tell you why they said no.
They gave a new writer a space to work and continue to dream. Most of us, that's all we want anyway.

Click images for desktop size: "Money" by Envy In the late 70 and on they were replaced by the over priced glossy mags. They didn't want many new writers unless you had an agent who could convince them you were the next big thing. They sold for 5 bucks an issue and advertising was 5 grand a page based on a 10,000 circulation.
They wanted the literary stars and the hot up and comers. They didn't have a space for a guy with a story to tell, who just had a good yarn.
The internet killed most of those mags. The internet. Its takes and it gives, don't it?
I have to say I don't like reading a big block of unbroken text on a screen. Which is why the e-books surprise me. I can't struggle though electronic works of books I like on a computer. Surprises me that there's so much interest in the Amazon Kindle. I don't want to read a story that way. I want the luminous part to come from the words not from the pixel. But maybe they'll succeed and be so desperate for product that they'll read submissions from the little guys like us. Maybe even send out badly typed emails as rejection letters and explain what's wrong with your story, at least what's wrong to them.
It would be nice to see the writing business change in the same way the music business is going to have to change.
If they let those kind of stories get out there so people could read them on the subway on the way to work then I'd be a lot more interested in the tech.
Until then I'll stick to newspapers, I guess. But I would like to read about people's stories, the way things seemed to them at one spectacular moment in an otherwise forgettable day.
Its why I like blogs. Most of them are as dull as life. Sometimes they're not and I relish those moments.

I was 0 for Sunday in the NFL. Doesn't matter. I preferred these results.
Now we'll have a banged up San Diego at New England this Sunday. And a team I still think is cruddy playing against the ebullient Packers. Which means I have a good shot at seeing my dream Super Bowl happen - Green Bay vs New England!
That would be decidedly RAH!
The conference Championships have a decidedly old world feel to them: Packers vs the Giants is like so 40's and 50's. And the AFC seems real old school with Chargers at New England. 60's stuff. Sort of cool in its way.
I hope I get to see the games.
Cause, yeah, still fighting with the cable company. Now fighting to let me cancel!
A new millennium . . .