The World That's Coming

I’ve been particularly lucky when it’s come to my writing career — not only in the types of writing work I’ve been lucky to get, but also the outlets I’ve been fortunate enough to write for. For whatever reason — I think it’s some mixture of skill and good luck, personally; a small amount of the former and a lot of the latter, if you ask me — I’ve managed to write for mainstream outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, Wired, Time and many more across the years, making sure that anything close to a bucket list of places to write for has been kept relatively minimum.

That said, there still is a bucket list.

Some of the list is literally impossible — either outlets that no longer exist at all (1980s official fanzine Marvel Age, for example) or exist in the format that I initially fell in love with them, like Entertainment Weekly, which I’m not even sure has a print component at all anymore. Others are simply unlikely, because of personal experience. (There are multiple outlets I’ve pitched to on more than one occasion, with no luck or even a response; such is life.)

The one thing tying them all together is the fact that each of the outlets I still dream of writing for are ones that I was in love with as a reader, long before I thought about becoming a writer myself. I can remember poring over copies of Wired in the library of my old art school, for example, or picking up (far too expensive) copies of Entertainment Weekly in the U.K. even though they referred to things I didn’t really have any first hand knowledge of. Marvel Age was the first time I’d seen writing about comics, when I discovered it at age 11; each one seemed to be a window into something new.

Given all of that, it’s understandable that I’d want to be part of that even now that I’ve seen (and been) behind the curtain myself. All I need now is a time machine and even more good luck to make it happen.

I found myself rewatching If… and O Lucky Man for the first time in decades recently, and the experience left me particularly nostalgic for the first time I saw the two movies, way back in the 1990s.

Watching them now, I still found all manner of things to enjoy, not least the sly surrealist humor that’s thread through both movies to greater or lesser extents. (If… is the angrier of the two, and O Lucky Man the more broadly comedic in its satire, but the two share the same DNA just as the share the same actors, directors, and characters — although, of course, neither is actually a sequel to the other.) Lindsay Anderson’s meandering direction remains a thrill, as well, feeling as if it’s ahead of its time in terms of later European directors.

This time around, though, I saw both as movies, as opposed to… whatever they were the first time out, for me. Back then, you see, they were more than just films; they had some power that I can’t explain even now, with years of hindsight.

Both movies came from the era that inspired Britpop, which was the dominant culture in my life at the time; but, as opposed to the self-conscious irony that was the underlying theory for Britpop in general, If… and O Lucky Man are heartfelt almost to a fault, sincere in their arguments even as they try to make jokes about the situation their characters are in — and that sincerity was something that I found particularly affecting, at the time.

In terms of subject matter and targets, they paralleled other things that I was into at the time — Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles most of all, unsurprisingly; Morrison has talked about their love for both of the movies, which was one of the things that drew me to them in general — and acted as a signpost that there was more out there than people keeping subjects at arm’s length or more interested in style points than actual points.

If… and O Lucky Man introduced me to things like Terry Southern, Lavinia Greenlaw, Deborah Levy and more, art that made my world bigger. (Not bad for movies more than a quarter century old even when I discovered them.) I feel as if I need more of that, even now.

I’ve started a new tradition.

It’s not something I intended to do, nor something that I take particular pride in, but nonetheless, it’s something that I’ve started to do every night, and something that I find a strange amount of comfort and pleasure in, so it’s not as if I can pretend that this is an entirely random happenstance, nor something that I do unthinkingly. It does, however, require a little bit of backstory.

There are two lights in the bathroom close to where I sleep; one of those lights has a switch by the door, the second by the mirror on the far wall of the room. It’s a relatively large bathroom, so there’s some space between the two switches, and in theory, they illuminate different parts of the room. The problem is, the switch by the door is for a light that doesn’t really work anymore; there’s a loose connection, so the light flickers for a few seconds like something out of a horror movie before going dark.

This means that the only working light has its switch inside the room, which means that, at night, I walk into a room that is almost entirely pitch black before putting the light on. And that’s my new tradition.

Well, no; not entirely. My new tradition is reaching out into the darkness to find the switch in the light, and realizing that, no matter what, the wall is always further away than I think it is, so that I’m reaching tentatively into thin air for a few seconds, edging forward and hoping to find what I’m looking for. That’s it; that’s the thing I find myself taking an unexpected pleasure in.

What’s strange is the amount of enjoyment I take in reaching out into darkness each night, and finding nothing there. I don’t know why, but every single night, I find it a thrilling and comforting experience. Each night, as I reach out to find nothing, and then edge forward, I internally joke that I’m living out a metaphor for something that I haven’t identified yet.

It sounds strange, perhaps, to write this considering just how long that I’ve been doing what I do for a living, but it’s only really in the last month or so that I’ve felt like “a freelance writer,” whatever that actually means.

I mean, sure; I’ve technically, legally, been one for… what, a decade or so, by this point? Maybe a little over. Before that, I was technically an employed writer, being fulltime staff for io9 when it launched for a couple years, and before that, I was a part-time freelancer who wasn’t really getting paid for it, but that’s okay, I also had a day job that paid the bills. I’ve been writing online for more than 20 years, but I wouldn’t really call myself “a freelance writer” until after I’d moved to Portland.

Nonetheless, that was more than a decade ago. But in all that time, it felt more that I was a writer who had a home base or two — Time, say, or Wired, or more recently, The Hollywood Reporter — and occasionally ventured out into other areas to see what was out there. More often than not, I was a “permalancer,” as the term goes, someone who had a guaranteed monthly salary to rely on, and then other things would go on top.

Not so now, of course; now, I’m scrambling and juggling different gigs and deadlines to make sure that I have something coming in to help with rent and bills. (Not enough, of course, but give it time; also, online writing in general just doesn’t pay quite so well anymore, alas.) It’s a skillset that I feel like I’m learning as I go, but there’s something thrilling about that — the thrill of the chase, perhaps.

Part of the learning cycle is, of course, finding out when you’re stepping on your own toes, as I did earlier today, pitching something that I thought was a winner to an outlet I was currently working on a story for. I was right, but only kind of: the new story got picked up, in the process putting the story I was already working on — indeed, the story I’d spent the entire morning working on — on hold, if not killing it outright. The new story, meanwhile, has the same deadline as the old one, meaning I’ll have to work doubly hard to hit it. So… huzzah…?

Freelance writing, it seems, may just be one big series of monkey’s paws, waiting for the wish to be made and the twist to arrive. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you.

There was legitimate, actual news from the comics industry yesterday — a development that not only took many people (including myself!) by surprise, but also is likely to have significant repercussions for a lot of people, including potentially threatening companies — and it was the first time in a number of years where that’s happened and I’ve been on the sidelines, instead of reporting on it. It’s fair to say that I really didn’t like that experience.

Part of me wondered if my frustration at just being a bystander was an ego thing, and that I missed the opportunity to have people turning to me for information and a small amount of snark. I suspect there’s some level of that, because why wouldn’t there be…? But there’s something more to it, I think (I hope); I missed the ability to try and parse out what was real and what wasn’t, to ask the questions I had about the whole thing and find out answers and try to get into the weeds about the whole matter.

That’s not to say that I don’t think other people were doing the same thing, or that I would be the only person trying to get exactly the same questions answered — so, again, I suspect that we’re getting back into the area of ego. Only I can ask exactly the right questions to make this happen! And yet… there really was some degree of that, to my shame. I wanted others to stop getting distracted by the wrong things, or to make leaps of logic that didn’t make sense (to me, at least).

Instead, I was left frustrated and thinking if only to myself more than once, and wishing that emails would arrive asking to give me money to write about it at some point during the day. They didn’t, and I didn’t. Instead, I return to the idea that there’s a bigger story connected to this one that I should be researching and pitching, before everything goes to hell and I lose my chance.

It’s been a couple of days where the universe has been giving me some kind of a sign — actually a couple — about what might be described as my career, and in a nicer format than I’ve been expecting after the last few months.

The first sign was something that I’m not entirely comfortable sharing yet, if only not to jinx something that could be very good further down the road. It’s currently not even a thing as much as it is the possibility of a thing, but the circumstances in which it came together — and the speed of same — makes me feel as if something’s happening that’s going to be interesting, if nothing else. (I’m being purposefully vague, but it’s an opportunity I’m excited about, especially if everything goes as hoped. It won’t be a quick process, however.)

The second sign was something that I’ve encountered before, but found particularly charming this time around. I’m working on a freelance story for an outlet, and I decided to get started by seeing if anyone else has previously approached the subject in any kind of way. The third result on Google… is me.

Thankfully, I wouldn’t be repeating myself with this new story; it’s literally taking what I’d previously written and adding a second chapter, in a lot of ways. But there’s something to be said for not only having previously approached the subject (and in a way that’s useful to me now, thankfully) and having entirely, utterly forgotten about it.

It connects with the mystery first thing, in some ways; the fact that someone approaches me about a topic, for the very reason that they’ve seen my work and they think that I’m on the same page with them. There’s a benefit to having been doing all this for so long that I have that kind of back catalogue, I think, and perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I continued to do it for a little bit longer, after all.

There are certain bands and musicians that I cycle back to on an irregular basis, as if they’re a planetary body that I orbit around continuously; while it’s been a surprisingly long time since I’ve returned to my Elliott Smith phase, I’ve recently gone back through Big Star’s back catalog in recent memory, and I’ve returned in the past week or so to the Beatles, thanks to the cursed song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” propping up my head for no immediately apparent reason. (Not the least of which being, it’s a terrible song so it didn’t get there through sheer quality, sadly.)

What’s particularly enjoyable about these nostalgic musical mystery tours is the potent combination of getting to revisit the familiar and discovering something new along the way — whether it’s hearing a particular arrangement differently (There’s a version of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” that strips away the crowd noise and orchestration, and just hearing the band be a band completely changed the way I heard that song from that point forward, for the better), or finally making out something in the mix that’s been frustratingly unclear for years to that point. The best music, or at least the music I find myself coming back to over and over again, is the music where I find new spaces even after I think that I know something as intimately and completely as anything in my life.

That’s not to say that there’s not a joy in listening to something and it being exactly what you expect, I should add: there are songs where everything is just as I remember, and there’s a joy in that, as well — getting the ba ba ba baaaaas right in your head, or remembering the impossible notes that they reach every single time. Imagining the sounds as shapes inside your head and seeing them in every detail as they play out in front of you.

It’s possible that I just really, really like music, of course.