Words and communication

Technophobe male fails in bid to post a comment about my anti-men songs; I have to post it for him

One of my male acquaintances was keen to comment on my recent blog about the sexist songs I’d been writing http://fwords.co.uk/2012/01/25/my-unfortunate-reputation-for-writing-sexist-songs-leads-to-a-commission-from-a-disgruntled-friend/

Tony the Modern Folk Poet (aka Joseph Kilhane) has heard my little ditties at the pub music night so he has an interest anyway, and he seemed particularly to have taken exception to the conversation that followed my blog post in the form of comments. Kitchen Slattern http://kitchenslattern.com/ commented that women were often “driven to the knife edge of sanity by every little thing they [men] do, or don’t do as the case may be”. She told the tale of a friend who’d backed her car down the driveway and repeatedly run over a pile of gifts her soon-to-be ex-husband had given her.

I replied with another anecdote, that of a friend of mine who’d loosened the stitches in the seat of her soon-to-be ex-bloke’s work trousers, so that the next time he sat down at work his trousers split, making him unable to stand up again for the duration of the meeting.

Someone called Learning Curve (who didn’t leave a link) told how her man had complained his “balls were shrivelling” as he reluctantly did the vacuuming.

And Diane Henders http://blog.dianehenders.com/ said my song lyric  “Men, men, why is it never easy, I start off feeling horny and end up feeling queasy” – had made her “bellow with laughter”.

The Modern Folk Poet felt compelled to respond, but the poor lamb couldn’t work out how to do it. Clearly, the instructions that WordPress kindly provides, namely “Leave a reply..post your comment here… post comment” were not specific enough for him.

I’m not suggesting that he can’t follow simple instructions because he’s a man, by the way – there are plenty of men who know how to do things. If I say he’s a techno-idiot, that’s not sexist – the fact that he’s a man has nothing to do with it.

He did manage to email me his reply, though, so I’ll assist by posting it below. It’s well worth a read, as it shows how the Poet can produce a clever ditty on virtually any subject. And he can set most of them to music and perform them as comical songs on the guitar or mandolin.

“Having read this blog, I struggle
To understand its message
It must all be a joke? So?
Right! I laughed.
A woman living with a man?
Hates his guts? (but hasn’t gone)
Long-suffering? Self-sacrificing? Martyr? – or plain daft

And can somebody say from when
Women sharing homes with men
Today are still expecting
To become their slaves
I suggest it’s not the gender
That is likely to offend ‘er
But the way that said cohabitee behaves
And therefore, bad cohabitees – Are they always blokes?
Or could they be a her and not a him?!
It isn’t being male
That makes the idyll fail
It’s being inconsiderate and dim

There are males who do the cooking
(Not all of them bad-looking),
There are blokes who’ll clean throughout the house or flat
Admitted, there are others, should have stayed home with their mothers
But there’s women too, who should be doing that

The answer seems to me to be
A pre-cohabitation clause
Inserted in a document
That you both sign in blood
Is he into cooking?
Is he into cleaning?
Instead then, do you settle for a stud?

For still you stand upon the brink
With some gormless shiftless gink
Not thinking just how low you’ll sink
Or what he may become
You like ‘em muscular and tough?
Or maybe just a little rough?
I know, I know, it has to be
The contours of his bum

Some women too are dim and careless,
heartless, callous, inconsiderate ,
slovenly, preoccupied, untidy round the place
Do I sound misogynistic ?
No more than you sound misanthropic !
We’re all in this together – part of
The selfish human race”

Good, innit?

The Modern Folk Poet is available for poetry-writing commissions and live gigs. Here’s a link to his website http://www.modernfolkpoet.co.uk/ but it won’t do you much good going there, since someone else set it up for him and he doesn’t know how to update it and consequently never visits it. I’ll act as his manager and claim a commission on any bookings.

Pic credit: graur razvan ionut, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=987

Co-operatives, collaborations, partnerships – antidote to the default setting of corporate greed?

Pic credit: Master Isolated, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ images/view_photog.php? photogid=1962

I’ve always liked the concept of co-operatives, the idea of ordinary people joining together and sharing the labour and the profits of their labour, as opposed to fat-cat directors skimming off the cream and leaving a few drops of sour milk for the people who make their wealth possible, in the form of pathetic little bonuses and below-inflation pay rises.

Somehow, in our loony capitalist world, it’s become accepted that one particular group of workers, those that sit in offices and administrate, should be an elite who earn disproportionately way more than the rest. “But we bring in the money!” they cry in justification for enormous salaries. Yes, and we accept we couldn’t do without you. But we clean the toilets, or serve the lunches, or treat the sick, or produce the staff newspaper, or handle customer complaints, or deliver the post, or mend the computers…. And you couldn’t do without us! Everyone, every function, in a business is interdependent. No business can succeed without everyone performing their own role to the best of their ability. Where did this idea come from, and how has it taken root, this idea that those who perform one function should be so much better recompensed than others?

Directors of big companies; premier league footballers; and top bankers are the obvious examples. They’d argue “but we’re the best at what we do!”. That’s as maybe. Isn’t everybody in a company the best at what they do? They wouldn’t have been recruited in the first place if they weren’t. Who’s to say who brings more real value to a business – or especially to society? Why the huge disparity in remuneration? There are only 24 hours in a day and even those who need little sleep can scarcely work more than 16 hours a day, even if they wanted to. Even then, even working twice the hours of the “normal” worker, that’s no reason to be paid more than twice the rate of that normal worker.

Let’s face it – if we were living in an egalitarian society where everyone earned the same salary, the footballers would still choose to be footballers, the company directors would still choose to be company directors, the cleaners and porters and postal workers would probably still choose their jobs. We’d choose our jobs according to our own abilities and tastes. No one job is intrinsically more worthy of reward than others.

You might find, of course, that some would opt for what is currently considered to be a lesser role, knowing in their hearts that their current position exceeds their abilities. That would be fine – by all means, weed out those who have been promoted beyond their abilities though over-confidence, or through knowing “the right people”. Others would choose a job that suited their natural inclinations, that they couldn’t do under the old system because it wouldn’t pay the bills – like helping with literacy classes or looking after sick people, or rescuing abandoned animals or helping the homeless and dispossessed. Useful jobs.

Ultimately things would all even out and everyone would be doing the job that best suited their personalities and aptitudes and interests – and society would be all the better for it.

There is an alternative to the default setting of corporate greed, and it’s not new. The co-operative movement began in Europe in the 19th century, spurred on by the exploitation brought about by the industrial revolution, the idea being that workers should be self-governing, reaping all the benefits from their own work. No one person would be in the position of being able to command an income far bigger than the rest. Everyone would do the job to which they were best suited, everyone would work equally hard, and everyone would share in the rewards.

Probably the best-known today in the UK is The Co-operative Group http://www.co-operative.coop/corporate/, the UK’s largest consumer co-operative, which comprises the supermarket chain and insurance, travel, banking, legal and funeral businesses. The core idea is to sell products in a fair and honest way, support communities and make a reasonable financial return to the member-owners.

Then there’s the likes of the John Lewis Partnership, another major retailer, not strictly a co-operative but still with the aim of divvying up the profits among the people who create them. http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/. It works – the staff like getting a share of the dibs and the customers like getting the good service that is a result of that incentive.

Here’s another example of collaborative working. This week, I did an interview with office and meeting space provider Regus http://www.regus.co.uk/, whose UK regional director told me about a growing trend for co-working – where unrelated businesses choose to share an office for the opportunities that provides for company and networking. This has been particularly noticeable at Regus’s sister brand B.hive, which is targeted at women – and headed by well-known businesswoman Lynne Franks http://www.lynnefranks.co.uk/.

Regus UK regional director Celia Donne told me: “We have many examples of women who met at B.hive and who are now working together or finding ways to help each other. It’s like a private members’ club but with business facilities. Women, especially those in smaller organisations, tend to seek a slightly less corporate approach.”

Then there are the quirky little local examples, like the Spring Garden pub and live music venue in Hotwells, Bristol, which is run as a CIC (Community Interest Company). It operates as a non-profit organisation, putting all surplus money back in to music and drama and local interest groups. I’d provide a link except its website doesn’t seem to work, so maybe it’s gone out of business, which would be a bit shit considering I’m singing the praises of co-operatives. Anyway, it’s a nice little place and when I went in there the other day to ask if they had live music on Saturday the bloke behind the bar said “no, but you can come in and play if you like” which, considering he’d never heard my singing, makes him a very brave man.

And finally, in my list of examples of lovely collaborative enterprises, is the newly formed Golden Mustard Media http://www.goldenmustardmedia.co.uk/. The idea is that a load of creative types – writers, designers, marketing bods etc – club together to offer the same services that a larger marketing agency could do. Golden Mustard offers the whole gamut of creative services, such as design, marketing, copywriting and PR – and I’m going to be part of it, which is fab. The brains behind the idea is an entrepreneurial journo called Graham Garnett, who will bring in the business, sub individual projects out to whoever is best suited to handle them, taking his percentage in much the same way as any agency does. I’ll let you know if it works!

My unfortunate reputation for writing sexist songs leads to a commission from a disgruntled friend

This isn’t me. I can’t play standing up yet. Pic credit: photostock, http://www. freedigitalphotos.net/images/ view_photog.php?photogid=2125

My little group of chums at the local pub music night have the idea firmly fixed in their heads that I’m a writer of sexist songs. When a bunch of musical types get together, they often ask each other “what’s your genre?” and the answer might be Folk, R&B or Skiffle – or in extreme cases Delta Blues, Ethereal Pop or Thrashcore. No-one bothers asking me, because it’s generally accepted that my particular genre is UK Pub Rock Urban Folk Comic Misandry.

This reputation stems from an early piece that had the lines “Having seen you eat asparagus, I’d rather take a monkey home instead” and “your clothes, your hair, the way you breathe, the way you drink your tea – everything you do and say annoys and antagonises me”.

A later song produced the lines “It’s a mystery that I can’t explain – he’s like a retarded slug with water on the brain” and “what can you do when a man won’t listen… I think I’ll have to buy that man a hearing aid”.

I seem to be constitutionally unable of treating songwriting as anything other than a comedy vehicle, so I’m unlikely to ever be Diane Warren or Guy Chambers or that bloke whose name escapes me who writes all the Meat Loaf songs.

Anyhow, the upshot of the retarded slug song was a challenge from one of the blokes at the pub – couldn’t I write a song that wasn’t anti-man? I tried to oblige by devising something loosely based on that nice romantic tune of Dolly Parton’s, I Will Always Love You. Somehow, though, I couldn’t find the words to match the pathos of that song. It started off well: “I said I’d write a love song, just to prove I can…” but my subsequent difficulty matching content to melody is illustrated by this later excerpt: “Oh men, oh men, why is it never easy? I start off feeling horny and end up feeling queasy”.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised then, to receive an email at the weekend from a friend who appeared to be experiencing a certain amount of irritation with her resident male. “I’ve started writing a song,” she wrote, “can you do anything with this?”

She attached a poem that told a tale of a woman driven to distraction by close proximity to her husband. It was the old, old story of cupboard doors left open, washing up left undone, dirty clothes left strewn about, the kitchen left in chaos after a “cooking” episode for which he expected to be praised.

I was messing about at the time trying to master a new chord progression on the guitar – G, Gmaj7, G7, C, G, Gmaj7, A7, D7, G – and this worked well with a line from my friend’s poem that seemed to present itself as the chorus – “Men, you make us so perplexed. We always must remember that, you are the weaker sex”. After some tweaking and pruning to get it to scan with my melody, The Weaker Sex was born. I felt the chances were slim of my being believed at the pub when I truthfully insisted that these lyrics had not come from the pen of Yours Truly, and of course performing it would typecast me even more as She Who Writes Those Anti-Man Songs.

Still, I gave it a go. It was deeply rewarding, when I got behind the mic and asked “would anyone like to hear an anti-man song?” to hear the encouraging sounds of assent from the females in the pub. The men were less vocal, for some reason. They’d seen me approach the mic with only a single sheet of music, so they knew darn well they were getting whatever was on that piece of paper, so it wasn’t so much “would you like to hear?” as “you’re going to hear”.

Still, the song got a bit of a laugh, though when one of the women approached me on her way home and asked curiously “do you really hate men?” I realised my reputation as a sexist had been well and truly established. I quite like men really – well most of them, anyway. I’m going to try and change genres to something less controversial, like Vietnamese Trance or Salsa Erotica.

Boozy housewife, boar masturbator and feisty feminist – not me, but more of my favourite bloggers

Don't fancy yours much. Pic credit: http://www. freedigitalphotos.net

After nominating 12 other bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Awards yesterday, I ran out of steam and had to go and make my dinner, so I deferred the remaining three of the 15 I was supposed to nominate. Here they are now.

http://kitchenslattern.com Kitchen Slattern writes about cookery and domesticity, and believes that doing the housework “well enough” is far preferable to doing it well. She claims to have found “the easy way to do anything that needs doing around the house”, and as part of her researches has perfected the art of drunken vacuum-cleaning.

This “boozy floozy with a bad attitude” towards her domestic chores lives in New York and says Martha Stewart’s perfectionism makes her ass ache.

http://fortyshadesofgrey.blogspot.com/ Nat is a feisty, forthright, fearless and hugely articulate feminist from the UK, who blogs about sex, politics and feminism. I’d hazard a guess that she’s never been beaten in an argument. She also has a lovely turn of phrase when it comes to describing her adversaries – “spunkwaffling dickwits” and “piece of rotting crotchfilth” are among the gems.

Once gave me invaluable back-up when I was embroiled in an online discussion with a piece of rotting crotchfilth who’d taken exception to a mention I’d made of his dickwittish sexist attitudes.

http://occupylsx.org/ The blog of the Occupy London movement, this contains lots of info including details of this week’s High Court ruling that the camp should be evicted. The protesters will be appealing. Also current are posts about this week’s “trials” being organised by Occupy, to examine allegations against Tony Blair for war crimes and against RBS concerning the rights of its major shareholders – the general public.

Oh sod it, here’s some more. I’m on a roll.

http://www.editormichael.com/ Michael LaRocca is an American whose jobs have included teaching English in China, writing novels and masturbating boars. His blog gives tips on writing, information about English language and literature, and humorous “random ranting and raving”.

http://hisvorpal.wordpress.com/ Hart Williams is another American writer – a novelist, illustrator and screenwriter. He has made me laugh with his acerbic comments on LinkedIn writing groups and he stands alone as the only person with whom I have ever got involved in an email discussion about panty pads. Blogs about writing and politics. Very highbrow and, politically, a progressive Democrat (hope I’ve got that right, I was going to say “bit of a lefty” but that might not be a compliment over there). His claims to fame include being accused in American media of wanting to shoot conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

http://vanbrown.wordpress.com/ Yet another American blogger. What is it with me and American male wordsmiths? I don’t even know many Americans in real life; they scare me a bit – if I went for a pint with one I’d be worried they’d invade the pub and appropriate all the beer so there’d be none left for me. The internet’s great for discovering ones that probably wouldn’t.

Anyhow, Van’s forte is amusing stuff about “dawgs” – he’s a great fan of the canine species – but he also does general humour and political stuff. Not sure if he’s another lefty or not – appears to be disdainful of both Republicans and Democrats.

That’s the lot for now. I’ll do some more another time, as it’s been fun.

Award details: http://versatilebloggeraward.wordpress.com/vba-rules/

Hoorah, I’ve been nominated for a Versatile Blogger Award, and in turn I name my own favourite bloggers – it’s a blogging love-fest!

Crikey, I’ve been nominated for a Versatile Blogger Award. I can’t remember the last time I was nominated for anything, other than to go to the bar ‘cause it was my round.

The awards seem to be fairly informal – it’s not like the Oscars or the X Factor or anything. There is no official judging process and no prize, other than recognition from one’s peers. In fact, cynics have described the whole scheme as being a giant internet chain letter – sooner or later, every blogger will have one. But it’s a bit of fun, and a chance to give a bit of a slap on the back to other bloggers who have amused, educated, entertained or informed you.

There are rules http://versatilebloggeraward.wordpress.com/vba-rules/, first of which is to thank the person who nominated you.

So herewith, thanks to Susan at http://lostnchina.wordpress.com. Susan is a Chinese-Canadian whose very amusing posts include the one that first attracted me to her blog, namely the one about her Chinese relations insisting on her wearing special lucky pants. Thanks, Susan, back atcha, as you say over your side of the pond, I believe.

The next rule is to select 15 other blogs/bloggers whose output you like, and to nominate them for the Versatile Blogger Award.

I don’t have time to do all 15 right now, so I’m going to go with the 12 I’ve done so far and come back another time to nominate some more. For now, my nominations are as follows (drum roll……):

http://chroniclesofeldon.wordpress.com Amusing chatter about life, parties, friends etc from a young American chap who goes by the name of Awkward Eldon. He sets the scene with a sit-com-friendly cast of odd friends and a dog who is described as looking like the Anti-Christ.

http://roboticrhetoric.wordpress.com Fluent and amusing chatter from “an inexperienced and impressionable youth of 18”, British this time. What is it with me and young men?

http://sw9red.wordpress.com/ Ooh, another young man – at least, I’m assuming he’s young and a man. Red runs what he calls “Brixton’s best-read political blog”. One of several blogs I like for imparting to current events a left-wing perspective that we never see in the mainstream, corporate-owned media. Appears to have been learning the guitar recently, so his politics is now mixed with stuff about music.

http://laughingnoam.blogspot.com/ A strange but interesting and prolific mixture of intelligent comment and humorous chatter about politics and society, with a left-wing slant. For some reason I thought Noam was another young man, possibly because of a recent adolescently-comical Twitter exchange about “bum fudge”, but a recent post says he’s been a fan of David Bowie for 30 years, so he (or possibly she) can’t actually be a teenage boy. In light of this, I’m not sure he’s strictly eligible for my nomination, but I’ll let it go this time.

http://wrapcloth.wordpress.com/ Nigel isn’t a teenage boy either. I know this cos he has referred to his grandchildren. He and I are both in writing forums on LinkedIn and keep ending up in the same discussions with scammers, loonies and argumentative forum members. In a small-world coincidence, he lives in the same Welsh town, hundreds of miles away, where my grandmother lived briefly in 1911, and knows the owner of the hotel she worked in.

http://unemployedhack.wordpress.com/ Hack isn’t a teenage boy either. He or she (I know which, actually, but I won’t tell) is probably in his/her 30s and writes about his/her experiences of being an out-of-work journalist, offering commentary on the difficulties of finding work, the benefits system, the greedy utility companies and the British media and political system. His/her cat is a major character in the blog and anything to do with cats is fine by me.

http://pigsinwales.blogspot.com/ Right – this one’s definitely a girl. I know this because I’ve met her. Liz Shankland was on my journalism course many years ago and has since gone on to become an expert in pig-breeding, smallholdings and similar rural pursuits. Anything you want to know about piggies or farming, she’s your woman.

http://malvikajaswal.wordpress.com Another girl! Malvika lives in India and writes about an eclectic variety of topics, including Indian culture, art and cooking. She gave me a nice recipe for dall which I keep meaning to try.

http://prettyfeetpoptoe.wordpress.com/ And another girl. Pretty Feet’s writing style is perhaps more closely aligned to my own than any of the other bloggers I’ve named, though she’s got shitloads more followers. Bah – who needs followers anyway, bloody nuisance, the lot of them. Pretty writes fluently and humorously about shoes, the Underground and living in London and stuff.

http://www.thewritersremedy.com Shelley is an American who blogs about her experiences of trying to develop a freelance writing career. Her blog includes handy hints and tips, commentary on scam sites and the like.

http://talkingquestions.wordpress.com Back to blokes. These are two Americans called Lee and Gage, who do a weekly podcast of themselves chattering on humorously about all manner of things. It’s a bit like listening to a pair of harmless drunks in a pub.

http://theactivists.wordpress.com/ Socialist artists, writers, photographers, bloggers, poets, illustrators, all dedicated to creating “a revolutionary information flow”. This blogs offers an alternative perspective on current affairs and challenges readers to think more deeply about their dependence on capitalism and traditional attitudes.

That’s the end of the nominations. I hope they all realise they owe me a pint.

As the final rule in the awards scheme, nominees have to reveal seven facts about themselves. Here goes.

Seven pieces of useless information about me

1)    I know how to train cats to use a cat flap. All you need is two clothes pegs and some tuna. And some cats. And a cat flap, obviously.

2)    The most expensive item in my home is a set of saucepans. I found out only after I’d scrimped and saved to buy a really decent set that the Beckhams have the same brand in their kitchen. I tried to take the pans back when I realised this, but the shop said that sharing a liking for high-end cookware with a not-too-bright footballer was not grounds for a refund.

3)    I get really annoyed when people walk slowly. They dawdle and idle along, blocking the pavement and walking three abreast and getting in my way when I’m trying to get somewhere. Or they trail behind me, puffing like wart-hogs, when we’re out on country walks. Pick your feet up and MOVE, for goodness’ sake.

4)    I picked up a recorder recently for the first time since I was a child, and found I could remember most of the notes. It was very exciting. For me, at least. Not sure the neighbours had such a good time.

5)    I have a qualification in map-reading and navigation and have co-navigated a two-day trek on Dartmoor (one of the UK’s remaining “wild” areas, for those outside the UK). Yet I still manage to get lost with annoying regularity when taking out friends who were temporarily impressed by me boasting about my navigation skills. Now, I mostly go on my own. Most of my friends are doing doggy paddle in the Grimpen Mire, so they can’t come with me.

6)    Inspired by a friend of a friend who wrote a comic song about lady gardens, to the tune of Sonny & Cher’s I Got You, Babe (it was called I Won’t Shave, Babe), I wrote a song about breasts, to the tune of Mary Hopkin’s Those Were the Days. It’s called Your Chest is Best, and includes the line “Oh my friend, we’re older and we’re wiser, but down our tops the bazoomas are the same”. I hope to record a video of this at some stage so you’ll be able to listen to it.

7)    I get unreasonably annoyed by catering establishments that don’t understand the definition of cappuccino. It’s one third espresso, one third steamed milk, one third froth, you arses, not a cup of milky mud with some scum on the top.

Another musical collaboration produces a song about regrets, relationships and cocaine addiction

Pic credit: Daniel St. Pierre, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=691

I shouldn’t be so astonished that a pub full of people can write and perform 10 songs in under two hours – because I know, having been part of the process before, that it can be done.

But even so, I was impressed by the speed with which a creative product can be assembled, given a bunch of willing musicians and would-be musicians, and an hour-and-a-half deadline.

This was the latest monthly session on Sunday of the London Songwriters www.meetup.com/LondonSongwriters/, whose mission is to throw groups of random people together, give them a theme and a deadline, access to some musical instruments, and see what transpires.

My “band” consisted of me, Tony the Modern Folk Poet (my pal from the local music club, the one who keeps writing songs about me being fat), a science lecturer called Keiran and a professional singer called Shola.

To begin with, as the organiser, Murray, gave us the theme (“beginnings”) it was just me and the Modern Folk Poet and I sensed trouble ahead. Collaborations aren’t for everyone; you have to enjoy and value others’ input, and if you’re not used to working in a team that input can become a distraction, or even a nuisance. All of the Poet’s vast catalogue of clever songs and ditties have been produced on his own and he has firm ideas about the writing process. His idea of collaboration is for him to write the lyrics, in a quiet room in his own time, perfect them, devise a basic melody then have a proper composer do the musical arrangement.

Explaining this, he self-deprecatingly likens his thoughts to shards of crystal, which would lose their sharpness and brilliance through exposure to less bright pieces of glass.

So I’d suspected the “chucking ideas around with strangers in a noisy pub with a time constraint” style of song-writing wouldn’t suit the Poet, and he certainly didn’t take to it like a duck to water. We’d got no further in 10 minutes than establishing that we wanted pathos rather than comedy in our song, and the clock was ticking. Then Keiran joined us and things started to move. Keiran told us about how he’d been talking to a homeless man in the street, and we thought that the theme of “beginnings” could relate to someone who’s become homeless and who ponders how his problems all began. It could be a broken relationship, a lost job, a drug habit…

The Poet wasn’t enjoying all this bandying of ideas – he muttered something about the sharpest knife in the drawer being blunted by rubbing about with the others – and disappeared to have a pee and a fag. Meanwhile, Keiran and I managed to scribble down a storyline that might work. (Bloke gets involved in cocaine, loses home, wife etc, looks back, regrets.) The rhyme scheme started out as a rather unusual ABC, ABC but it was a struggle to make the lyrics fit around this.

Our band’s fourth and final member arrived then. Shola is a professional singer and obviously used to this kind of thing. She suggested rewriting the over-complex rhyme scheme as a simple ABCB scheme. Most importantly, she suggested the catchy “hook” that would become the song’s main defining feature. We all agreed that the song would appear to be the narrator talking about a romantic partner, but that the last verse would be a denouement, showing that he or she was really talking about a drug habit.

Murray and the Poet both reappeared at this stage, the former to remind us that we had only 15 minutes left so should think about devising a melody; and the latter to suggest improvements to the metre and rhythm (the Poet’s always telling me I have no sense of rhythm). We scribbled down a final version and gathered round the keyboard (the Poet with his mandolin) to try and get a tune going on.

Somehow it happened and you can hear the result here

Despite the subject matter, it turned out to be quite a jolly, catchy number. Things fell apart somewhat towards the end when I was unable to read my own handwriting and sang the wrong words. But on the whole it went off reasonably well, given the fact that it had been such a rush-job, that Keiran admitted he could only play keyboard in one key – C – that you can’t hear the mandolin and that I sound like a pub karaoke singer.

Later on, during the open mic part of the afternoon, the Poet performed one of his comic songs, The Maid’s Day Off. It got a huge laugh and loads of good feedback in the anonymous critique session.  You can hear it here.

Castration, tax dodgers, flowers & Assange – strange search terms that have brought people to my website

If they're looking for info on these, they've come to the wrong website! Pic by me.

It’s fascinating to look behind the scenes at a website to view the search terms that have brought people to visit.

Of those visitors to my site that were the result of a search engine search, the single biggest number came via searches for the name of the person who produced the vulgar T shirts I blogged about on a couple of occasions. That topic also provoked the largest single number of comments on any blog posts I’ve done, not all of them pleasant.

The second single biggest number of hits has come, not surprisingly, from searches for F Words – though I suspect some of these visitors may have been looking for something rather different!

The third biggest number of visits resulted from searches on my name. Again, some may have been hoping for something else – other Sue Fentons are available, so many, in fact, that I did a blog on the subject. http://fwords.co.uk/2011/06/23/me-myself-and-i-%E2%80%93-and-the-other-ones-%E2%80%93-how-i-found-i-wasn%E2%80%99t-unique/

A huge variety of search terms have brought other visitors. Some of the terms are really rather bizarre. I blame myself for this – it’s all because of my tendency to chunter on about random topics instead of sticking to the initial purpose of my blog, which was to promote my skills and knowledge as a freelance journalist. It’s funny – you start off with a policy of earnestly discussing missing apostrophes and bad spelling and before you know it, you’re rambling on with tongue in cheek about bacon sandwiches, corporate tax dodging and fantasy dog breeding. That’s the beauty of blogging, I suppose – it brings out the true inner writer – but of course Google and the other search engines are always lurking about taking notes and suggesting you as a source of fascinating information on subjects that (in my case) include: 

Bagology

American death penalty

Greek flowers

Assange

Coastal pathway

Ode to a Nightingale translated into Arabic

Some are really rather bizarre, since I don’t remember having actually written anything on these specific topics – still, Google appears to think I’m an authority:

Lapland immigration strategy

Hairy arms

William Hague fascist

Chihuahua fights

Indecent behaviour within the British Army

Naked lady jumping into water

Ugly gorillas

Topman tax dodge is quite a favourite term – I show up well on this one due to a couple of posts I did on the subject a while back.

Another favourite one is piglet castration and I wasn’t even responsible for this one – it was a guest blog written by a college friend who breeds pigs. Another guest blog, by an journalists’ union official, got me hits from people searching on sacked for Twitter comments and similar phrases.

Other phrases that have brought visitors here include:

Crap press releases

Dogging

Obnoxious responses to Facebook misspellings

Larry the prime minister’s cat

Jane Asher

Commas

Daddy long legs porn

Space Hijackers

Italian tableware

Swearing

Arms trade hoax

Circumcision

Troy David

London protest

Bad English.

Of course, it’s even nicer to be found through searches that are actually relevant to my work as a journalist. One visitor today found me after searching “I want to find a freelance journalist in Surrey”. They (or someone) even looked at my online CV, details of qualifications and clients and fees. My curiosity is now piqued – who are they, and did they find what they were looking for, or did my chunterings on about bacon and Lapland send them scurrying off to get the Yellow Pages?

Forum members resort to festive facetiousness as the thread that just won’t die nears 300 comments

One space or two? Pic credit: Stuart Miles, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ images/view_photog.php?photogid=2664

Back in the year 1985 – at least it seems that long ago – someone posted a question on a LinkedIn writing forum asking whether there should be one space or two after a period (full stop for British readers).

At time of writing there had been 283 comments in reply. EVERYONE has an opinion they want to express on this issue. It’s astonishing really – the question surely isn’t fascinating enough to justify such an outpouring of international opinion. The answer is perfectly straightforward. It’s basically this…

For technical/typographical reasons, back in the days of typewriters and traditional printing, two spaces were necessary and desirable. Now we have computers and digital printing, we need only one space.

That’s it. Virtually all the participants in the discussion would agree with that summary. There’s no need for this incessant stream of comments, many of which repeat what has already been said before many times since the original question was posed. Yet still they come, as more people see the question and leap in to answer it.

As the thread got into three figures, one member of the group referred to it as “cruel and unbearable torture”. Another started a side discussion about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin – another topic that people have debated endlessly over the course of centuries. Then about two weeks ago some of the residents started getting restless, asking whether the subject had not been exhausted yet and calling for the thread to be put to death.

Cynthia said “Isn’t it time to shoot this topic?” Larry agreed with her, adding: “The horse is dead. Let’s stop beating it.”

Timothy suggested that the carcass should be buried while Maynard wittily remarked that the thread had given him the idea for a new novel. “A man dies,” he wrote, “his corpse is reanimated as a zombie, and he goes on forever – a stumbling hulk with outstretched hands.”

I suggested that Maynard should put some vampires in his story too, then he could sell the screenplay as the latest in the Twilight franchise, The Curse of the Endless Double Space Debate.

Terry then nominated Tim’s comment as the last word on the subject. I betted him it wouldn’t be, and Gary pointed out that it couldn’t be, because not only had I commented subsequently but that he had, also.

“Somebody make it stop!” pleaded Stephen, and I wondered whether anyone who carried on the conversation could be made to carry out a forfeit of some kind?

Cynthia, who’d gone away for a while, presumably thinking the thread had been humanely exterminated in her absence, returned to beg: “PLEASE, SOMEBODY SHOOT THIS TOPIC! There’s nothing new to say that hasn’t been said in the preceding 223 comments.”

This is the interesting thing about it. People whose job involves the written word all seem to have a natural urge to express their opinions and show how knowledgeable they are – and if someone is actively seeking opinions, asking a question that we are able to answer, as in a discussion of this sort, that gives us free rein. The fact that the question has already been answered is almost irrelevant: we will shove our two penn’orth in regardless. I can be as guilty of this as anyone: if I see a thread on which I feel I can contribute some crumb of knowledge, I’m in there.

Maybe it’s because so many of us nowadays work from home, where there’s no-one to talk to – our internet chums become our instant audience, our sounding board, our sparring partners. If we want validation, admiration, even a bit of an argument, we can get it in seconds on internet forums.

In my defence, I wouldn’t usually choose to comment on a topic that could have been adequately resolved and put to bed weeks previously. In the present case, I suggested that surely it was time to talk about something else, to which Cynthia responded that it had been time to talk about something else at least 100 comments ago!

“Is mercy killing permitted in this thread?” enquired Maynard, while Barbara confessed: “At first I thought also enough, enough. But no longer. Now I am with the program.” She compared the thread to a tribal gift that keeps returning, and Terry remarked, philosophically: “It is the eternal wheel. If you miss a comment, don’t worry, for it shall come around again, just in a different guise. Should you depart this earth, take comfort knowing your grandchildren shall be on this thread.”

Maynard confided that as a result of the interminable discussion he had gone into therapy and said I was welcome to join him at the rest home. “The psychiatric staff are working out a treatment plan for what they have classified as “the one space vs. two space syndrome,” he said. I hope he’s having a nice time there: for now, I’m still here, lurking about waiting with baited breath for the next comment on the subject to pop up.

As I write, we’re at 283 comments – if you’re bored as the clock ticks round till the holidays start, and want to watch as the thread winds its inevitable way to the 300 mark and beyond, here’s the link

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=80669496&gid=37917&commentID=62190321&trk=view_disc&ut=3v1Lt-hkrNSl01

Fantasy dog-breeding: a new variety that fits in your handbag but that will bite your hand off

Careful, he'll have your hand off. Pic credit: SnappyJack, http://www.morguefile.com

I was reading the local free ad newspaper on the train to London the other day and was intrigued by the Pets section.

I’d never realised the extent to which dog owners are now interbreeding their pets to create monstrous new varieties. I’d heard of the Jug (cross between a Jack Russell and a Pug) because I’d met one in a pub. I’ve also met the love child of a French Bulldog and a Pug – not sure what it was called though – a Frug maybe?

It all seems a bit strange, this desire to create new species just because you can. I mean, aren’t Jack Russells or Weimaraners or Dalmations or whatever nice enough as they are, without having to cross them with something else? After decades of creating a pure, distinct variety, owners are now deliberately watering down the individuality of their pets by crossing them with something else. I can’t work out if the owners of these peculiar half-breeds do it because they want to create a silly new dog or just a silly new word.

Here are some of the daft breeds you can get nowadays – the parentage is fairly obvious from the words.

Cockapoo

Goldendoodle

Labradoodle

Springador

Yorkipoo

Jackuahua

Westipoo

Pugalier

I’m not making any of those up – they are all readily available through the pages of the Reigate Friday Ad – and elsewhere, I’m sure.

It got me thinking, if breeders are going to muck about with nature by creating new breeds just for a laugh, why can’t they make ones that are really worth looking at? What if I had too much time on my hands and easy access to horny canines of various breeds, what would I create?

I’d love to try an Akitahuahua. The combination between a Chihuahua and an Akita fighting dog – fits in your handbag but takes your hand off when you try to get your keys out.

Or how about a Graschund (Great Dane and Dachshund)? Ten stone of muscle barely supported on four-inch legs.

Or a Newdle (a Newfoundland crossed with a miniature poodle). A muscular ball of black curls on dainty feet with a propensity to leap into puddles looking for people to rescue.

Maybe a mixture of a special needs Doberman and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier – a Daffy.

Or cross a Dogue de Bordeaux with a poodle and you’d have a Dogpoo!

Mating a Shih Tzu with a Jack Russell would be fun too, because a few months later (or is it weeks – my knowledge of canine biology is rusty), you’d have a Jackshiht – geddit?!!

Even better, bring a bulldog into the Shih Tzu equation and you’d have Bullshiht.

But my favourite fantasy cross-breeding exercise would be a dog crossed with a cat – something you could take for a muddy country walk that would have the intelligence to find its own way home if you lost it, could let itself in through the catflap, would daintily clean itself, scare off intruders but wouldn’t howl the house down if it was left alone while you went to the pub.

In which I co-write a song, rather to my surprise, and perform it in public

Pic credit: Nuchylee, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1824

With work being on the slow side, my endeavours lately have been focused almost entirely around creative pursuits, namely music. Having been songwriting for about a year now, alone and with no real idea what I’m doing or whether I’m doing it right, I decided it was time to get some knowledgeable input so I joined the London Songwriters Club http://www.meetup.com/LondonSongwriters/ and went along to their December meeting at the weekend.

The format was great – for starters it’s in a pub, which is always a bonus. Anyway, you get put into a group with two or three other people, quite likely all strangers to each other, and are given a theme and told you have an hour and half to write a song on the subject. Each team then had to perform their song, then there was a guest speaker then an open mic session where people can perform songs they’ve previously written, and get anonymous feedback from the audience.

My team began as me and a prolific songwriter and former music teacher called John Clarke http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDaddio1, who’s been playing the guitar since he was five. Our subject was “Winter” and John said it made him think of a madrigal featuring the line “April in my mistress’s face”. I suggested that we amended that, since the theme was winter, to “December in your face”, and we were off, with a song about a woman who fancies her bloke much more than he fancies her. His expression is always frosty, his eyes cold, his heart frozen, that kind of thing.

Then we were joined by a late arriver, Jennifer Lee Ridley http://www.myspace.com/jennyridley, a music graduate who plays flute and sings and who has the added attribute of being able to arrange and compose. That’s a skill I’ve noticed not many performers have got – some can’t even read music, let alone write it. Jennifer’s specialities include setting poems inspired by the great Romantic poets to music. She came up with a great line about December mist coming down like a shroud, which neatly took us into the second verse, then our final member arrived, one Melissa Dawson-Bowling www.myspace.com/melstarsmusicbox, who plays keyboards and sings, her genre being (my words not hers) power ballads. Melissa spotted straight away that we had no chorus yet, and suggested “With you it’s always winter, but never the festive season”. It’s hard to remember who contributed specific bits – I suppose that’s the way with collaborations – if everyone remembered every last syllable you’d never stop arguing over whose song it really was – but I think I did the bit about the narrator wanting her relationship to be warm like July, but it never is, much to her distress.

We also got a nice bit of assonance, with a line about “icicles in your eyes”.

John was already creating a very workable melody on the guitar, Jenny devised a nice intro on her flute and at the end of the session we were ready to perform – or at least they were. I left that bit to them, not being the strongest of singers myself. Jenny and Melissa did some lovely harmonies that were all the more impressive knowing they’d not performed together before. Click here to hear never the festive season

The guest speaker said our song was “delightful” and had a pleasing melody. Some readers might remember him if they are as old as I. Back in the 1970s there was a group called Marshall Hain, who had a hit with Dancing in the City. Well, the speaker was Julian Marshall, who was the Marshall out of Marshall Hain. He came from a musical family and got into songwriting while still at school, where he met Kit Hain. They went on to have one more hit before the group broke up, though Julian said they are still friends. They are still earning a nice sum every year from that one hit, which gives hope to everyone who’s striving to write a song, though it seems most of the money earned by performers these days is from live performances rather than from royalties on songs. Julian still writes and is now a music lecturer and runs courses in songwriting http://www.londonsongcompany.com/.

Anyway, on Monday I had to start a little job I’ve been asked to do – some web copy for a pro musician I met at a freelance training event the other week. She wanted 300 words about herself – to be trimmed down from masses of information about her musical experience and performances that could be found in various sources.

As I was working on this, an email popped up from John Clarke, who attached the audio of Never the Festive Season. The timing was perfect, since one of my chums from the pub folk club was due to pop round to drop off some sheet music I’d left at our mutual guitar teacher’s. When Bob arrived I dragged him in and made him get his guitar and accompany me as I devised my own simplified version of the song. Bob does a good line in Spanish style guitar, which lent a new aspect to the song, and we twiddled around for an hour or so.

Then in the evening it was off to the pub, where I was determined to perform Never the Festive Season. Tony the Modern Folk Poet, who has been giving me informal guitar lessons and telling me I have no sense of rhythm, in between showing me round his garden and asking me to explain the internet to him, offered to accompany on mandolin. This turned out OK after a reasonably tedious procedure of trying to get my guitar and his mando in tune with each other. The song went down very well – though I realised the tape recorder hadn’t been turned on, so I had to inflict it on the audience a second time. Luckily, they’re a tolerant crowd. My version was far simpler than the original, being dictated by my limited chord vocabulary (I mess about with minor chords and 7ths and stuff in the privacy of my own home but am pretty much a three-chord trick sort of girl under the pressure of public scrutiny) and rather slower (my singing pace being limited rather by the rate of knots at which I can change chords). Still, it came out quite nicely, I think, and the exercise has given me an appetite for more collaborative creativity.

In which I learn some new words and discover that you’re never too old to enhance your vocabulary

Anyone for a long word? Pic credit: Arvind Balaraman, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1058

I learned three new words or phrases this week, simply from lurking about in a discussion on LinkedIn. One member (British) laughingly suggested that an Americanism employed by another member (American) was peculiar to the “13 Colonies”. The American took exception to this, saying the phrase was “fracked”; and the Brit responded he hadn’t meant to offend, it had merely been a “lulzy” comment.

I had to ask for clarification, since I didn’t have the first idea what they were going on about. It seems that “fracked” means bad, not acceptable. “Lulzy” is a contemporary term meaning amusing, jokey. The 13 Colonies reference is to the colonisation of what is now the US by the Brits.

You’d think three new words or phrases in a day was enough to add to one’s vocabulary, but then I had an email from my friend Kim, the one who jacked in her job to go to university, at the age of what we’ve agreed to call 42.

I’m fairly accustomed to Kim’s vocabulary and in my presence it’s been primarily employed in negotiating the purchase of a couple of pints of Gem bitter from publicans, or casting aspersions on left-leaning politics. So it was a cause of astonishment and amusement to her friends when K started her English degree this term and started sprinkling her conversation with words like “ameliorated” and “ethereal”.

Anyhow, Kim’s email said would I mind casting an eye over her latest essay, devoted to an analysis of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. She’s under the impression I know what I’m talking about, having done a degree myself as a mature student. I begged to remind her that I graduated 10 years ago and have forgotten most of what I learned, but it seems a vague analysis from a forgetful OU grad is better than a poke in the eye from a blunt stick, so I agreed to give her Keats the once over.

I was impressed to see that K’s thoughts were now focused on enjambment, synecdoche, caesura and spondees.

A spondee, as everyone will be aware, is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables, as determined by stress in modern meters. As we all know, it’s unique in English verse as all other feet (excepting molossus, which has three stressed syllables, and dispondee, which has four stressed syllables) contain at least one unstressed syllable.

Synecdoche, as none of us need to be told, from Greek synekdoche (συνεκδοχή), meaning “simultaneous understanding”) is a figure of speech closely related to metonymy (the figure of speech in which a term denoting one thing is used to refer to a related thing). It is more distantly related to other figures of speech, such as metaphor.

Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line.

But you don’t need me to tell you all that. (Thanks to http://www.wikipedia.org/ for the translations.)

Anyhow, I was at a client’s Christmas lunch yesterday and was telling some of the other party-goers about my friend’s impressive new vocab, and it was suggested that we should phone her up and tell her some other long words that she might like to include in an essay. There were some quite intelligent suggestions and I carefully wrote them down on a piece of paper, only for one of my client’s other suppliers to decide there would be more comic value if he were to eat the list – thus enabling him to say that he’d “eaten his words”. Sometimes, respectable media industry types do this kind of thing after an afternoon on the juice of the grape.

He consumed the paper with every appearance of relish and enjoyment, and we promptly forgot the words written on it. We still phoned Kim – it would be rude not to phone a friend after several hours’ reckless drinking – but we found ourselves at rather a loss when it came to thinking of high-brow words at a moment’s notice. Our second list eventually comprised:

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”

“Felching”

“Machu Picchu”

and

“Um diddle diddle diddle, um diddle ay!”

No-one was entirely sure whether “rimming” was a real word, but it sounded good so we threw that in as well.

Scarcely adequate in terms of the composition of an academic paper, but Kim received our suggestions politely enough and we all had a good time, which is the main thing. It’s all testament to the entertaining complexity and potential of the English language.

.

Internet row erupts about crap money offered to writers: insults exchanged in heated debate over money

Tempers frayed on the internet. Pic credit: jscreationzs, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ images/view_photog.php?photogid=1152

I love it when a good argument breaks out on the internet, and there was a great one the other day, on a LinkedIn writers’ forum of which I’m a member.

Like so many heated debates in the many LI writing forums, this one was about the shockingly low rates of pay being offered for so-called “writing opportunities”.

To give some context to this, the internet is increasingly populated by so-called “content mills”, sites that need text to fill space. The only criteria these mills impose is that the content should pass Copyscape – a program that ensures text has not been directly plagiarised from existing articles. Doesn’t that sound lovely and fluffy and warm? They’re community-minded, they abide by the law, they don’t encourage plagiarism. I’ll return to this point in a moment.

In return, these businesses offer their writers appallingly low pay. They offer $5, $3, sometimes as little as $1, for each article.

Now, in my world, an article takes a good half a day to write. Take a relatively straightforward one-on-one interview. Half an hour, up to an hour, for the interview, then an hour typing up the notes, then a good two hours sorting the notes into a coherent form, to the required length, then an hour trimming, tweaking, improving, self-editing. Where the article demands that original material comes from a variety of sources it can take much, much, longer.

Do the math, as they say in the US, and you can see how the offered $5 for an article translates into bugger all per hour.

Of course, the secret with many of these offers is that they don’t actually want original material. The very fact that they are so anxious to avoid Copyscape detection stems from the fact that what they require their “writers” to do is, essentially, to plagiarise. Offers of “work” are often specifically to “rewrite” articles – they just don’t want to be caught out doing it. One I came across last week wanted people to “rewrite” recipes, at $1 a throw. Now, someone tell me, why would they want a recipe to be rewritten, unless they were copying someone else’s original cookery ideas?

Many of the sites are basically looking for writers from places likes India, where the cost of living is so much lower than in the UK, Europe and US that what we consider to be low pay is acceptable. But I’m constantly surprised by the number of people responding eagerly to these opportunities who are based in Europe and the US. “I’m really interested” they’ll post in response to the latest offer of “work”, offering details of their experience and links to their published work, not even thinking to consider how much they’ll ultimately receive per hour in return for their work. And I’m convinced that absolutely none of these naives stops to think that they’ll have to pay tax out of their meagre earnings.

I’ve often stopped by these discussions to urge people to think about whether they might not be better off spending their time stacking shelves, or delivering leaflets.

Some sites not only offer stunningly poor pay, they also ask the poor saps who work for them to pay a monthly fee. Which brings me back to the recent discussion. Someone called Ben (I’m changing everyone’s real names) had posted an offer of work paying “up to $25” per article – on content mills peak that usually means “from bugger all”, with the “up to” figure representing the absolute maximum, rarely achieved. After dozens of half-wits had posted their enthusiasm for this opportunity, a guy called Nick pointed out the downside, that the small print revealed there was a $47 a month fee for the privilege of doing the work. He suggested politely that this was a scam.

“No one should have to pay that type of money to find work,” he said.

Impressed by Nigel’s ability to cut to the chase, I added that, having looked at the terms and conditions, it seemed “THERE IS NO GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL EARN ANY MONEY”. I pointed out that genuine job offers do not charge and suggested that readers steer clear of this opportunity.

Ben popped up at this stage to deny he was running a scam. He said it was a business opportunity, like a McDonald’s franchise. “Do you just walk into corporate headquarters and say,”Hey I want to own a McDonald’s franchise, give me one please, I have no money………”? he asked. “Sometimes it takes money to make money”.

I suggested that the analogy with a McDonald’s franchise didn’t hold water. A franchisee is buying a stake in a company whose name is known globally and whose business model is proven to work. The buyer, I pointed out, has a genuine opportunity to generate satisfactory revenues and profits – and McDonald’s can supply evidence of its financial standing, marketing investment and commercial probity.

I said that comparisons with a burger bar might more accurately be drawn with McDonald’s offering to employ a trainee burger flipper at minimum wage but only on the condition that he returns most of his wages in the form of a fee.

Nick came in at this point to back me up, saying the work required to break even, by selling $564 worth of articles a year, would be extremely difficult, especially given that there might not be sufficient quantity of jobs available to achieve this.

Ben replied that the monthly fee was “the cost of doing business” and would be a tax write-off. This enraged someone called Patricia, who retorted, quite rightly, that “no-one should ever pay to work”. She accused Ben of taking writing as a career down a notch and commented that he obviously had “suckers” willing to pay him with no guarantee of earning any money in return.

This cut Ben to the quick: he said Patricia should keep her “rude” opinions to herself and added: “Have a great day! I am going to make some money.”

Another forum member, Kath, said he wouldn’t be making any of his money off of her back and said she’d rather buy lottery tickets than pay him. This neatly reminded me that I’d intended to invest in the Euromillions lottery, and off I went to buy a ticket.

I got back to find that things were getting personal – Patricia had called Ben a “creep” and accused him of making money off “desperate losers”. This prompted Ben to suggest Patricia attended an anger management class. “Get out of the house and enjoy the world, you might even make new friends,” he suggested.

In his own defence, to prove he wasn’t a creep, Ben claimed to have worked for the US army, air force and police force, somewhat apropos of nothing, I felt. He’d even been “Police Officer Of The Year”! Though perhaps not employer of the year, I thought.

I asked if, when he was carrying out his various civic duties, he’d have considered “up to” $25 to be fair pay for hours of work, and whether he’d have been prepared to pay a monthly fee to his employers for the privilege of getting an unspecified bit of work from them now and then? I questioned whether perhaps he considered writers’ skills, effort and professionalism less worthy than his own?

This is a fundamental issue in a world where “writing opportunities” and those willing to cast all considerations of cost-effectiveness out of the window in order to get those opportunities, are freely available on the internet.

Everyone thinks they can write and almost everyone, it seems, is willing to do it for next to nothing. Do you ever find accountants, plumbers, bricklayers, lawyers, vets – anyone other than writers – willing to work for peanuts despite having training, qualifications and experience in their field? Do you ever find anyone expecting them to do so?

100 creatives in a room: the cure for writer’s block, pissed-off-ness and other freelance ailments

You don’t have to be 10 years old to learn new stuff. Pic credit: saizamix, www.morguefile.com

Cure for a jaded freelance who’s got all gloomy about the downsides of being self-employed: stick her in a room with 100 other starving creatives and don’t let them out till they’ve eaten all the biscuits and had some ideas.

Had a great day on Saturday at a training event run by the Federation of Entertainment Unions. Being a member of the National Union of Journalists means I am also part of the FEU, as are members of Equity – the actors’ union – the Musicians’ Union and the Writers’ Guild. Members of all four unions were present at this all-day seminar about branding oneself as a business and promoting said business through blogging.

I was curious to see if I could distinguish the actors from the musicians, from the writers. At first I thought that perhaps the better-dressed, most attractive ones were the actors, but there were some quite presentable journos there too, so that was just a stereotype. There did seem to be a behavioural distinction though – some of the delegates talked a lot, confidently and articulately, and asked loads of random off-topic questions, while others looked at their watches and said could we all stick to the point ‘cause the course leaders had a lot of ground to cover before lunch. I suspect the former were the actors and the latter the journos but I may be wrong. Comments welcome on this aspect!

The musos didn’t say much but what they did say was pertinent.

Anyway, we had some lively discussions and picked up lots of good tips about branding and blogging. I won’t tell what they were: join a union and go on your own course. Course leaders were Miranda Gavin, deputy editor of the Hot Shoe photography magazine, and David Woods, creative director at Surgery Creations.

My little group for group work and lunch consisted of me, three actors, a photographer and a musician. So had some interesting convos and made some new contacts: have since been talking to two of them about the possibility of doing some writing work for them, which would be great. Another phoned me yesterday about a technical aspect of websites, under the mistaken impression that I knew more than I did. I didn’t, and thus wasn’t able to be of much practical help, but we had a nice chat anyway.

The seminar came soon after an interesting meeting I’d had with an author who is about to publish an online serialisation of her first book, Confessions of an Office Slut. Nicola Hare http://www.novelsbynicola.com is also due to publish her second novel, When Tigers Attack, online and in paperback, in the new year.

We talked about a unique aspect of online publishing – because she can change the story right up the last minute pre-publication, Nicola is planning to write in several extra characters as cameo roles (like walk-on bit-part actors, if you will), with links to their real-life websites. Two roles will go to local people as prizes in a competition, one is the prize in an international competition, and one will go to me, as part of a trade-off: I’ve written the press release to promote her books to the local media and in return I get to be in a chick-lit novel!

This whole area of “linking” online is still rather a mystery to me but I’m intrigued by the concept and curious to find out what the outcome might be in terms of links to me from Nicola’s book, when it comes out.

Anyway, all this creative stuff has helped to dispel the gloom into which I fell last week (see earlier blog). Long may it last.

The bad side of being freelance: down-hearted musings from a temporarily peed-off journo

I’ve got the right hump today. Pic credit: Mary R. Vogt, http://www.maryrvogt.com, www.morguefile.com

Freelance journalism isn’t all it’s sometimes cracked up to be. When I couldn’t connect to the internet this morning, for no apparent reason, my lack of easy access to intelligent, onsite, free  IT support, taken for granted by anyone who has a nine-to-five, got me thinking about all the bad things about the self-employed life.

You get none of the benefits like paid holidays and pensions that employed people take for granted. You also have to mess about with book-keeping and doing annual accounts: after a few years you get the hang of this but for the many journos who, like me, are simply crap at administration and arithmetic, it’s a constant chore. It could get worse too: for tax reasons, journalists who work on a contract basis are being increasingly asked by employers to become limited companies, and this could affect me soon too, as I’m in the running for a couple of contract positions. Being limited involves even more admin.

Then there’s trying to get paid. I’ve only just received a tip-off fee I was promised from a national newspaper a year ago. The time I had to spend chasing this up over the course of months was far disproportionate to the measly £100 involved, and it was only when I got the NUJ involved that the paper’s finance department finally creaked into action and coughed up.

There is also the constant struggle to find enough work. A report out this week reckons something like a quarter of all freelance journalists are struggling to find enough work. Swathes of redundancies in the media mean more competition from other journalists driven out from their cosy corporate lives into the freelance wilderness. Then there’s always a glut of would-be writers willing to work for peanuts, increasingly from other English-speaking countries, notably India, where many people can write English reasonably well, albeit not idiomatically. Plus the far lower cost of living means they can work for sums most British journalists wouldn’t stack shelves for.

And there are plenty of publishers willing to take advantage of this situation. I’m referring not to conventional print media publishers, many of whom understand the desirability of employing qualified, experienced native speakers if they want a quality product that readers will buy.  I’m talking about the growing number of online publications whose sole aim in life appears to be to fill pages with search-engine-optimised text. They’re known as content mills – this is a phrase I’d never come across until recently, which shows either that it’s a fairly new trend or that I don’t get out much. Possibly the latter.

The owners of these mills don’t especially care what the text says, or how well it’s written. They just want text. Cheap text. Even better, free text. Sometimes the work offered is ethically dubious, notably requests to rewrite (plagiarise) existing articles from elsewhere on the internet, or to write university students’ essays for them. The mills have the nerve to ask writers to work for nothing, or next to nothing, on the basis that it will give them “exposure”. If you have had work published, the theory goes, you will find it easier to get paid work in future. The logic is hugely arguable, since being published on a rubbish website with low editorial standards, dubious ethical standards and little content worth reading is hardly a recommendation.

You only have to spend some time on the writers’ and journalists’ forums on LinkedIn to see how rife these so-called opportunities are and to see how many people are eagerly and naively applying for them, only for the inevitable disappointment when they realise the work pays less than the minimum wage per hour.

Not all is doom and gloom as a freelance, of course, or no-one would ever do it. You can’t beat the variety – I get asked to do all manner of things… interviews with business people, proof-reading chick-lit, writing web copy, editing staff newsletters… I have friends who happily mix a bit of journalism in with other things that bring them a bit of income, such as charity fund-raising, teaching English, and singing.

It’s all about adaptability, as I found yesterday when I went up to London to attend a journalists’ and PRs’ networking event. I’ve been to these things before and they’ve proved quite useful. Even if you don’t meet anyone who can put work your way, you usually meet someone who you can have an interesting chat with about non-work related stuff – last time it was politics and song-writing, the time before that genealogy and IT. So I was full of good intentions to rock up there at opening time (6.30pm), have my free drink, work the room and come away with lots of business cards.

Things went a bit awry though, when I popped in to a friend’s office in Mayfair at about 4pm with a view to us going for a quick cup of tea before I headed off to the Strand for the networking. I’m not sure how, but the nice pot of Earl Grey I’d had in mind turned into a bottle of Merlot. My friend Jayne argued very convincingly that the Merlot was a far better idea, and that it would be best all round if I forgot about the Earl Grey. I found I agreed with her and we spent a very nice evening under the heaters outside a crowded pub talking to random strangers. I realised at some point, well into the second bottle of Merlot, that I’d missed the networking event and that in any case it would be best if I took myself home to bed, but as J pointed out, I’d still had some networking of a kind.

The only problem with that logic is that it gave me this morning a somewhat pallid complexion and a rather jaded view of the world – to coin a phrase I heard only today for the first time, it was a “hump day” – to which the computer’s decision to bugger me about and not connect to the internet just added further misery. Never mind – tomorrow I have a meeting with a proper creative writer, who actually produces novels and stuff, as opposed to pissed-off bloggy rants against the world. There might be some proof-reading work to come from it, or there might not – either way it will be nice to talk about the creative process.

And the internet has come back on, so things are looking up.

I love spam and so does my ego: more hilarious comments that people attempt to post on my site

Someone called “Mandy” left a very flattering comment on my blog the other day. “I was just seeking this information for a while,” remarked Mandy. “After 6 hours of continuous Googleing [sic], at last I got it in your website.” Glad to oblige, Mandy!

“I wonder what’s the Google’s problem [sic] that does not rank this type of informative web sites [sic] closer to the top,” she continued. “Normally the top web sites are full of garbage.”

I’d have been a little more flattered had the post she was so impressed about not been a random moan about my car breaking down at the end of the street. Frankly, Mandy, if you can’t find something more useful than that in six hours on the internet, you’re a bit wanting in the top storey, I’d say.

Someone by the name of “Hotshot” was equally complimentary. In response to several blog posts he commented variously “I agree 100%,,, Excellent weblog!… Preach it my brother… Now that is some good literature…. Never considered it that way… and Wonderful ideas!”

I wasn’t aware I had any ideas. I thought I just rambled on and on about stuff and then pressed “publish”. Still, you gotta get praise where you can – thanks, Hotshot, you’re one hot guy – geddit?.

One “Rhett Cheshire” must have been to the same School of Spam as Hotshot, as he also commented “Preach it my brother”. Er, don’t you mean “sister”? Never mind, let it go.

There was fulsome admiration of my writing skills from two separate businesses offering SEO services. “Oh my goodness! an amazing article dude”, wrote one, while the other made more of a literary effort with “Youre [sic] so cool! I dont [sic] suppose Ive [sic] learn [sic] anything like this before. So good to search out somebody with some authentic ideas on this subject. realy [sic] thanks for beginning this up [sic]. this website is one thing that is wanted on the internet, somebody with a little bit originality. useful job for bringing one thing new to the internet!”

It makes me go all dewy-eyed, that kind of thing – whenever I’m having a bad day I know I can pop into my spam folder at WordPress and get some much-needed, albeit insincere and badly spelled, admiration.

“Vance” agreed that my blog expressed “Interesting views regarding that!” – that being an account of an inane conversation in the steam room. “Robbi Beirbrauer” commented “Saved like a favourite, I truly like your weblog!” Not truly enough to subscribe to it, though, eh, Robbi?

And “Tommy” wrote to say “Just wanted to say you have a great site”. Come on now, Tommy, if you’d actually read the site you’d have made a comment about a specific post. Aren’t you really just trying to butter me up so I’ll put your comment on, complete with link to your anxiety medication?

Pic credit: Patchareeya99, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1890