[Author's note: 2016-05-24: Here's a picture of men drinking "Edinburgh Ale" in 1844. It is a photo type called "salt print", don't ask me. But the ale was described as so vile few could "dispatch more than a bottle" and it tended to glue the lips of the drinker together.]
A nothing day money-wise, pardon me, I grossed $5.00 on Internet rental. I did get a lot of research done and the going rate for freelance writing is between fifty cents and a dollar per word (tops, but it has to be top-notch material and sellable). I write, on average, 660 words per page. That ranges between $33 and $66 per page. Finding that angle of a buyer was not adequately covered in any of the material I researched. I know it would be too good to imagine, but I don’t see why somebody isn’t placing an ad for “ten well-written informative pages” on such and such a subject.
I’d handily write ten informative pages a day, twenty if my acceptance rate was 50%. Therefore, I take it that the rate is far below that. While fully aware that I am ignorant of most things a publisher considers other than the content, I have made $600 more money writing than anyone else I have ever personally known or met. Another thing, I was expecting a rate of pay of 10 cents per word.
I had to read four or five times as much material as necessary to get even these basic facts. Mind you, that still beats the 20:1 ratio for your average computer manual. A new fact was discovering that the biggest lobby against pseudonyms (books authored under an assumed name) is the credit collections industry. This also tells me that publishing is both a good trade for those in debt and a hard trace for the tax man. Was it Harry Truman that said, “They hired (borrowed) the money, didn’t they?”
Well, I say to him, “You lent it out, didn’t you.” The relevance here is that writing is obviously a difficult thing to police. I like it already. I also noticed that many publishers who state conditions say that you must be an American citizen. Really?
I took the Barbie in to the shop to discover that all the drivers have to be replaced. There are several sites that run the diagnostics and give you a list of the required drivers. That would be lucrative if so many people were not already doing it for free, more so because none of them seem to have a truly comprehensive set of the drivers. It is likely also true that many people are like me in thinking things on the computer should be cheaper, not more expensive, than at a store selling the same things. I don’t care for that argument that you are gaining some mysterious brand of on-line convenience [in most cases].
Music may be an exception. Perform you music live and frequently in front of small audiences and you never have to worry about piracy. But charge $400 to see a 60,000 seat spectacular and somebody in that number is going to get his money back any way he can. I got the top three hits in Mexico City.
In any order, "Tu De Que Vas", which I translate as “You Must Go”. A love song with words about the heart and time to ask more questions, all too fast for me except the phrase, “The question is if I love you.” Boringly over-orchestrated, ala late-career Beatles.
"Si Te Perdiera". My guess is “If I Lie to You”. Either that or “Without Slightly Browning You like Partridge Meat.” Another creepingly slow love song, the only words I can get are mis noches for “my nights”. Let’s hope the last one has a catchy tune.
"Detalles", meaning “Details” is last on my list. It is lively, but that brand of indistinguishable music I call Spanish Country & Western. It has that skipping little beat that I associate with comedians faking music on the Ed Sullivan show. The words chant about a lot of nonsense I won’t even try to grasp. Even my Appleton’s didn’t help.
I took a little time to find more information on video editing, but still have not, in 12 years, found a book that makes it simple. They are all full of jargon that assumes you know the difference between a clip and a chapter, and what you and I would call a movie is a “title”. To copy the movie, you have to copy the title, a senseless confusion of terms.
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