August 5, 2003 Spec This! Hello my darling little Rantlings. Duke here. Apologies for the silence over the last week. Things have been weird, but not the good kinda weird that warrants writing about. The threat of running outa Prozac is a constant these days, and at the moment it's a nine-one-one. And there's no help in sight. I'm just mental enough that I manage to bungle or thwart every opportunity to earn a little scratch, and social services ran me out on a paranoid rail with their mandatory fingerprinting and "Fraud Education" fear tactics. Furthermore, my printer cartridge ran out on me weeks ago without so much as a farewell note or an ink blot print for me to hang on the wall to remember her by. Without the ability to print out hardcopies, I can't take things out to my easy chair on the porch to relax and edit my work away from the computer. Thus, no new material. I blame my friend Wanda for this. Wanda asked me to make some changes to a massive manuscript I wrote for her, and I was either kind enough or stupid enough to say I'd do it for free. Free, you know, pro bono, gratis, all that. Or more succinctly in this case, on spec since we both stand to share the booty when and if this project of hers ever sells. So I said fine, I'd do it, but could she please come up with a twenty spot to cover the cost of a new ink cartridge and two new copies of the 90-page manuscript. She balked at this saying "How dare you ask me for money! Me, on foodstamps!" she complained. And so on, blah blah blah. As she raved on about the outrage of me asking her contribute toward her project, I stole a line from Fight Club, said "This conversation.. is over," and hung up on her. I get this a lot, this spec thing. This ex-spec-tation that I should write this or that for nothing because writing is such a source of unbridled joy for me. If I were a plumber and your pipes were blasting shit on your walls, I'd never be expected to work for free. A writer has so few tools and appears to have zero overhead, perhaps this is why people think it should cost nothing. But no. I believe the real reason is this: everyone and his mother thinks he's a writer. Or she's a writer. Or she wanted to be a writer. Or he has this book idea or script idea, got it all written in his head. "All I gotta do is write it down," he says. "Maybe you could do the writing part, eh? We'll split it, fifty-fifty. It's a blockbuster! Nah, I can't tell you the idea. You'll steal it." What. Ever. And Ernie wants me to pull a literary rabbit outa my ass and hang it on the wall for free, that insodoing I might make myself indispensable to the Enterprise. But he handles me badly. You gotta massage a wacko wordsmith like me. And something else. Two words: empty cupboard. Oh, and two more: phat resume. Cuz when a major depressive, panic disordered, obsessive-compulsive poet with frazzled nerves & scrambled brains has no food and no money, she can hardly create out of passion let alone launch some new literary venture on spec for someone else. Read Virginia Wolfe's A Room of One's Own. Ernie. Gotta love Ernie, even if he does insult me on a regular basis in some twisted, reverse-psychology endeavor to make me stronger. Ernie says that I've given him nothing to go on. HA! As if a decade of homespun coffee house zines & chapbooks, two novels, three screenplays, 600 pages of poetry, dozens upon dozens of web content writing samples, several months work as a reporter for a daily newspaper, a front page byline with the nation's 5th largest circulating newspaper, and a year's worth of dedicated web logging on my own site that prints out single-spaced to the thickness of an urban yellow pages, as if that ain't enough to faith-wager a small investment to jumpstart HIS literary vision. It amazes me how many people approach me with THEIR literary schemes and expect an all-talent, zero-capital guy like me to invest my time in them for free. You know what, folks? And I say this not to you the audience, buy to the proverbial you, you know who you are: YOU ARE ALL FUCKING NUTS!!! You're staring down a diamond and turning your back on it for the cost of a setting. Like all diamonds and flighty twinkling stars, I may be delusional. The dreamers of the biggest dreams usually are. But one day, very soon, this star is either gonna shoot across the sky out of reach of your schemes forever, or white dwarf itself out of existence. In either case, it won't matter a whit to me if.. YOU NEVER WRITE A THING.   The fundamental error here in this life, this story, this bungled and botched career of mine (and I'm sure many of you in every walk of life can relate), is that everything I've ever created has been done on speculation. Now, newly awakened after a few years placated by valium and a hairy stint in psych ward, I've come to realize that I've nearly specced myself into oblivion. I have no more spec to give. Zero. I have no literary schemes. I have no great literary vision. I have to wrestle a rugby team of futility and self-doubt every day just to bang out another suck-up proposal letter to an agent on behalf of my own work. Spec work for other people has (thankfully) become an impossibility. I couldn't get it past the bouncers at the door to the backstage of my mind even I wanted to. Besides, I'd rather go mow a lawn for twenty bucks green than ever, ever SPEC again. In closing, here's a little mantra, something from my heart that I feel deeply about and that I encourage any struggling writer out there in the world to print out and paste on your garret door: I just want to write and write and fill enough pages with my sometimes-grand, sometimes-goofy thoughts that said pages stacked one upon the other will, like the mountain of mattresses `neath the prissy princess, reach so high into Jack's beanstalk sky that I, old but spry and seated atop it, will feel only faintly the tiny pea of Earth far beneath my obstinate ass. Schreiben bis tot. Amen. RSM the Duke of Spec This, You Dream-Sucking Swine! Postscript: For the light-hearted among you for whom this has been an unsettling rant, here to reward you your patience and bravery in putting up with my ravings is a humorous tale, most certainly an uplifting one. RANTS! Write Me! ©2003 Rick McKinney ALL RIGHTS RESERVED