I wrote about Hot Buttered Bullshit over at Cracked, because when someone uses coffee to be anti-science then they’re the enemy of all humanity.

I was rewarded with this glorious comment

I’m not being sarcastic. I want to thank this commenter for imagining a beautiful world where I can make an entire living on one column a week. Yeah, I just get them to throw each article’s bucket of diamonds into the Jewellery Shed. Or maybe I have a Szalinski Atomic Space Reducer and buy a single shot of whiskey and a bacon sandwich each week, returning to full size only to write the next article and go to the shops.

It’s an amazing piece of writing. Possibly the first amazing piece they’ve ever written, considering how they clearly hate their job, and how their communications strategy with a site that (they think) pays better is to insult their crappy columns. We get so much characterization in so few lines of text. They have to work really hard as a writer, but not so hard that they don’t have time to read columns that they don’t even like. It’s just a tragedy that someone correctly identified the spirit “write hard and get on with it” but uses it in the most miserable possible way.

Then again, I’ve never heard a writer excuse their own work by saying “I was only obeying editors.” That doesn’t sound good. Yeah, we have to write as much as we can, but we still get to choose which pieces we take. I’m just flattered they think I don’t have to scrabble for new clients anymore. I’m always working on new pieces, new copy, new niches, new fun. I’ve had some hilarious jobs. And in the future I’ll have more hilarious jobs, as long as they pay.

I’ve written things you people wouldn’t believe.
Auction text for comics on teen romance in the fifties.
I’ve written motivational copy for server synergies with Virtual FutureTrends(TM).
All this … content … will be lost online, like tears in rain.
Time to write.

More ryting tekneek

• The Four Chaos Gods of Writing
• The Counter-Strike Guide to Grammar