This is me for the last week and a half, just typing and living very, very awkwardly. This morning I showered with a plastic Baja Fresh bag taped over the cast. It comes off on Thursday, but it seems like the surgery went well and everything is fine and I have almost nothing to complain about, except wearing a cast, which blows.

Well also about money, I guess. Yesterday I read this Malcom Harris piece on freelance rates and then went off about it a bit on Twitter-- click thru to learn how much I made last year!

I don't have much to add the conversation, which is much larger and more consequential than the particulars of my salary, but if you consume writing on the internet (...) I suggest you read a bit about the conditions and constraints under which that writing is produced. Not because you can do anything about it, necessarily (except pay for your media, obviously) but because it will help contextualize all of that internet writing, and give you a better sense of what you're getting "for free" (spoiler: almost always less than what you would have gotten from a pub you'd paid for!).

What did I write that you can read for free on the internet this week? Great question. I profiled Joe Manganiello for Playboy-- wrote a chill 1200 words based on a fifteen minute conversation in the corner of a soundstage, which is not on Playboy, but is a good detail about how a lot of celebrity coverage sausage gets made, which is, especially when press junkets are involved: as fast as is humanly possible.

 

Speaking of fast, I turned this one on Khloe Kardashian's scummy boyfriend and sympathy for women in the public eye around this weekend, and I was kind of grateful for the time limit, because when you're writing about the Kardashians, the news never stops breaking.

My BFFAEAEAE Miranda and I got to guest edit an edition of one of my fav newsletters, Two Bossy Dames. We talked coping mechanisms & harm-reduction under the capitalist patriarchy's industrialist complex and I'm very proud of how it turned out. (Mostly I'm proud that Mir still lets me be her friend, since she is so evidently so much smarter than I am.)

If you want to see what my right hand looks like under all of that gauze, I'll be on stage at the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend (Sunday, 12:30 pm, YA stage, you don't even have to buy a ticket) and there are still spots in my WWLA Young Adult Fiction class, which starts next week (!).

If LA doesn't work for you, I'm on a panel about self-defense in New York on April 29, alongside a bunch of rad folks including Nola Hanson, who runs a nonbinary boxing club you should definitely read about.

this tinyletter is free, but equally tiny donations are always accepted and appreciated.