pay the writer

"I don't take a piss 'til I get paid."

I ran across Harlan Ellison's work indirectly, through the chapter he gets in King's Danse Macabre. He's not an easy writer to find in a bookstore, old and cantankerous and mainstream-unfriendly as he often is, and I ended up reading a lot of his non-fiction first, in the big hardcover '90s reprints through White Wolf, like Harlan Ellison's Hornbook.

Which probably explains a lot about me, honestly. Ellison is not something you want to read in your late teens unless you're trying to do a specific kind of damage, like how the moment you get your driver's license, some well-meaning soul should make sure you don't get the chance to read On the Road. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that my being a writer is because of Ellison, but it sure as hell didn't help.

And yeah, Ellison is often pretentious, and yeah, there's that Connie Willis thing, and yeah, it's hard not to call bullshit on a lot of what he has to say about himself and what he got up to in the sixties. These are irrelevant to the project. I don't go to your house and talk about the time your hero was picked up in Las Vegas for disorderly conduct and managed to punch one last nun before they got the cuffs on and yes that happened. Humans gonna human. Moving on.

The point is that Ellison, imperfect as he is, has had a big influence on me. I'm thinking about him today because I'm looking to expand my pool of clients, and I keep going back to the "pay the writer" speech from Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

There's always a temptation to undervalue yourself when you write, because at least you're writing; at least you're out in the world, doing something other than work for yourself, most of which will never be seen. The reward structure on writing is fucked, so naturally, an apparatus has evolved to take advantage of that. It's why I don't like to read the Huffington Post; it's a creaking slave ship full of smiling people, many of whom are just happy to have one hand on an oar.

I've had people with my resume in hand mention paying me in "valuable exposure"; people who are actively hiring, who want you to do actual work, but don't want to pay you for it. Some are well-meaning start-ups who spent all the initial money on the web hosting, but that just means they don't know how to budget and they'll be gone in six months. Some, I'm sure, know exactly what they're after.

Fuck 'em. Tao of Ellison: my work is valuable, my time is valuable, my skills are trained. Pay the writer.