three cents: marcia, marcia, marcia

cray

                            May 10, 2016

                three cents: marcia, marcia, marcia

                        martinesque 
by manjula martin

                        [three cents = money + love + creative work, and i send it to you about once a month]

1. a thing about money 

I'm supercalifragilistically excited to announce that the new Who Pays Writers? website is now live. I started this crowdsourced blog of freelance writing rates back in 2012, and the redesign has been a long time comin'. The awesome folks at The Present Group designed it. During the redesign, we conducted a user survey, and I learned that 71% of the people who use Who Pays as a resource don't also report their rates to the site. Why? Mostly because they forget to. So if you're one of those people, you can now sign up for monthly email reminders to do your invoicing and report your rates for the month. I should probably sign up for that myself, actually. Anyway, you may now go forth and gossip about money in a way that's responsively designed. 

2. a thing about creative work 

Not to be the Marcia Brady of my own newsletter, but ... I HAVE MORE GOOD NEWS ABOUT ME. My book is now available for pre-order! Folks in the publishing industry know that pre-orders matter; pre-orders say to retailers and publishers, "this book is the real deal," so ... you should order one. Or five. Then you'll forget about it and it'll magically arrive in the mail this December, just in time to become the perfect holiday gift for the aspiring and/or working writer in your life, and/or you. Get it from the online retailer of your choice here: http://bit.ly/scratchss.

3. a thing about love 

Recently, things in my world have been crazy, busy, crazy-busy, and just plain cray. Much of it is good stuff (career! travel! events!) and much is bad stuff (illness! anxiety! the increasingly blatant fact that, as demonstrated daily in my neighborhood, stuff is fucked-up and bullshit). Sometimes it can be hard to balance so much intensity. So, here is what you should do when things get cray, whether it's the good or bad kind: BE NICE TO YOU.

For example, this morning I woke up and put on stretchy pants and then got stuck sitting at my computer working on my website instead of working out, because I wanted to and was excited about it, yet still I felt disappointed that I hadn't exercised. I am a person with very high standards, for myself perhaps more than anyone else, and sometimes I just can't understand how I am not able to excel at redesigning a website, having a busy new job, having a book coming out, writing a new book proposal on a deadline; then there's the novel, and committing to a new workout regime, and launching a new effort to eat more home-cooked meals, and fulfilling my pledge to several friends to do The Artist's Way whilst also figuring out a way to ignore all the cheesy god stuff... ALL AT ONCE. PERFECTLY. RIGHT NOW.

Then I remembered my roots (I'm from Santa Cruz) and I was all like, whoa, dude, chillax. You are doing great, man! But even a total shredder such as yourself can't do it all!

Sometimes the best and most efficient act of self-love is to remind yourself that even though you are great, you are just one human. And that's totally okay. 

some things to read 

If you are a writer who lives in LA, please win this residency and then invite me to visit: the Marion Davies Residency at the Annenberg Beach House (scroll down a bit to find the info).

Who pays podcasters? There's some great stuff about the biz of being a professional funny person in this Baron Vaughn / Maria Bamford interview. 

In other news, celebrities make money in the weirdest ways. 

And Radiohead just makes M O N E Y — here's a cool piece on Radiohead's corporate structure. It's much more interesting than it sounds, I swear. 

The kids at Study Hall are doing some good work here: What Writing is Worth. If you want to participate, check 'em out. 

I'd like to thank this article for answering my deepest yearnings for knowledge by figuring out who's making money from HAMILTON.

I'd like to thank this article for being awesome: The battle over the sea monkey fortune. I mean, that sub-hed alone is avant-garde poetry. 

Speaking of poetry: recently, police killed a homeless man in my neighborhood; when the news broke, someone I follow (I think maybe it was journalist Julia Carrie Wong? Julia, was it you) tweeted this Robert Frost poem, which is sad and still relevant: The Death of the Hired Man. 

Speaking of slightly less depressing poets, here's Eileen Myles: "Times I've Got Paid."

I recently visited a friend in New York, a poet, who lives in a lovely house amongst a lovely community in a lovely seaside hamlet. And she would leave it all if she could get a full-time teaching job. Because being an adjunct professor sucks. 

Maybe my job-searching friend should head inland and get herself a piece of that Low Overhead Life?

Oooh, the things I have heard about money from writers who've won literary contests and prizes. A career jump-start is awesome, but it can also mean financial confusion. I wish every contest or prize came with a personal-finance workshop. 

Via Austin Kleon's awesome weekly newsletter: what the Panama Papers revealed about how the rich use art to get richer.

Via The Rejectionist: Yasmin Nair's sharp review of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic (a book I threw across the room, although in general I am not one of those knee-jerk anti-Liz-Gilbert people, I actually find her to be very interesting and smart).

And here's a very interesting and smart article about how the advent of word processing changed literature—while also changing the role of women's work in cultural professions. Check it out. 

Lastly, witness The Cruel Fate of Audrey Munson, Who Learned that Physical Beauty can Be as Valuable As Government Bonds And As Dangerous As A Curse. 

Until next time, may all your fates be uncruel, 

manjula 

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