My Year in Review: It Happened
“Neglect of the colon is one of the major sins of civilization,” writes John Harvey Kellogg in the introduction to his 1931 magnum opus, The Crippled Colon. I stumbled across this book while browsing an antique store on the outskirts of Atlanta. Upon seeing the title, my first thought was: This would make a great gift for my intestinally-beleagured brother-in-law. Then I noted the city of publication (Battle Creek, MI) and saw the author’s name and realized I held in my hand 385 pages from the mind that brought us Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Gift or no, I had to have it. I plunked down my $10 and bought the dusty tome.
The subtitle — Causes, Consequences, Remedies — is grandiose in its terseness. The table of contents names illustrations used, each evoking some plain-spoken mystery: “X-Ray Views of the Food Tube,” “Lower Jaw of Mound Builder,” “Applying the Dumb-bell Vibrator,” “The Wet Girdle.” Now, as I leaf through its yellowed pages and remind myself why I spent a Hamilton on a century-old book of stool-centric wisdom, I understand why Kellogg’s manifesto drew me in. This was no ironic keepsake. This was a guidebook to the future.
Causes
I am by no means a full-time freelance writer. My day-job involves teaching freshmen college students how to write essays, but also how to read carefully, how to discuss with others, how to remain open to opposing views and come away from a topic with a more complicated understanding of something they thought they once understood clearly. The pay is garbage. So I freelance here and there to supplement the income, but mainly to practice what I’ve been doing intermittently since 2003: Writing about my tiny slice of the world for a tiny sum of money. One goal is to increase the area of at least one of those sectors. My 2015 has seen some victories and some dire, lingering defeats. So as not to upset my colon any further, let us focus on the positives.
By contributing to and maintaining a relationship with arts-and-culture company Kill Screen, I’ve had opportunities that otherwise might not have dropped on my head. This article on the PC adventure game Grim Fandango was commissioned by Longreads, a hub for longform online writing that also features exclusives written for the site. I didn’t play the game during its initial launch back in 1998 but I’d heard of its strange atmosphere and distinct mix of humor and the morose.
You play a version of Death, essentially, and the story is one part Mexican folklore, one part Glengarry Glen Ross. As time went on, PC tech evolved so greatly that the original CD-ROM became near-impossible to play. The original team finally got together last year to re-release the game for a new generation.
This story, about one kind of technological death, intrigued me; when my editor offered the article, an appreciation of sorts of an old dead thing being revived after much decay, I took it, my own ignorance be damned. The pay was better than my usual scattershot reviews, but the real reward was speaking with game director Tim Schafer, composer Peter McConnell, and getting in front of an entirely new audience.
Going Mobile: Nintendo’s New Evolution
While the previous piece came together over weeks of research and interviews, this reaction fits more closely the script of internet writing in 2015, in that something happened and a thousand pairs of hands began clacking away to pound out their thoughts, this Pavlovian response to craft a Take warmer than yours. Oh, may the slobber drip down our chins and fall between the keys, shorting out our laptops and giving us time to think for two seconds…
Anyway, I wrote about Nintendo, the Kyoto-based game giant that stubbornly refused to never, ever, ever release their games on smartphones, under they decided to do just that. The first fruits of this decision will be seen in March 2016. But the seeds were planted long ago, as I try to explain to an Internet audience throwing up their hands (and their lunches) to the news. Again, the reward here lay beyond the invoice: When an employee of Nintendo emailed me to say they’d read and enjoyed the piece, I figured I wasn’t so full of nonsense as my inner monologue sometimes suggests.
ALSO: Here’s a line from my notes on the subject that didn’t make it into the final draft: “A monkfish is ugly because it can be — no one else will see its face.” Editors are important, folks.
A Stroll and a Conversation with a man named Cash, the Ubisoft D.J.
I was in Los Angeles to cover the Electronics Entertainment Expo, an annual trade show for the videogame industry. Much of the three-days is spent wandering massive halls, filled with flashing lights and loud music, trying to experience the games of the future. Imagine if Sundance played all of the movies at once, in a giant warehouse, and you’re getting close to the foolishness of this particular errand.
The other main events are press conferences held by the larger companies — Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, others. Rarely does one witness so much self-aggrandizement and audience pandering in the span of an hour. Microsoft’s featured one of the most expensive cars in the world descending from the ceiling on a rotating platform. Ubisoft brought out Angela Bassett, whose face and voice is used in their upcoming game Rainbow Six: Seige, and who put on a fine show but, let’s be honest, she’s played Tina Turner, a harder motherf’er than any digital soldier coded to silicon, so this was a day at the playground.
Here’s my point: After the press conference, I walked out of the Orpheum Theatre, struck up a conversation with a random stranger, and immediately, after we parted ways, sat on the concrete outside a bank’s foyer and typed out this draft on my Chromebook so as not to lose the memory. It had nothing to do with games and it’s the best thing I wrote all week.
How Fifth Graders Reacted to Satoru Iwata’s Death
Mr. Iwata was the president of Nintendo from 2002 until his unexpected death this past July. The past four years or so I’ve covered the company for various sites, but I also remember playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! as a kid for hours, wondering how Soda Popinski’s skin had turned that delicate shade of mauve, and calling a boss enemy in the Konami arcade shooter Life Force a “pussy” in front of my big brother, who immediately paused the game and asked if I knew what that meant, which I didn’t. So games have been an influence for better or worse.
When the leader of a global company dies, you don’t expect to feel loss. I don’t know what the CEO of Mazda looks like even though I love my 2005 5-door hatchback named Roxanne. If Mazda’s head honcho perished, I’d feel bad, but I wouldn’t mourn. When I learned Iwata died, I broke down crying.
My summer teaching gig took place at an academic camp, my students ten or eleven. I wondered how they’d take the news. I wondered if Nintendo even mattered at all to kids already stuck on Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy’s and Ariana Grande videos. So I broached the topic, folding it into the day’s lesson. My friends: they did not cry.
The response was fascinating, two-fold: My students had compelling, funny, disturbing, thoughtful things to say. And the readers of the piece responding to my students’ response was equally telling. The article incited, by far, the longest comment thread of my year’s work. Would that I’d encouraged a more philosophical line of thinking than, “Children are simply an unnecessary larval stage in human development,” but you take what you can get.
I moved from Boston to Atlanta last summer. My wife and I had the intention of buying property. The very first house we saw was covered in wallpaper, hooked up with intercoms throughout, touting a basement with thick red shag carpet and an attic with a “secret” library behind a wall. In a word: Amazing. Then we learned who lived there previously. Melissa and Steve Whitmire donated the sale of the house to the ROAR Foundation, a charity that runs the Shambala Preserve, a preservation for big cats in southern California started in the ’70s by old Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren. Whoa, I thought. Then I Googled “Steve Whitmire.”
Whitmire is an American puppeteer, best known for being the performer of Kermit the Frog and Ernie — roles he inherited after Jim Henson’s death in 1990.
WHOA.
When I learned Henson died in May 1990, I did the requisite math and saw that this past May would be the 25th anniversary of the Muppets creator’s untimely passing. I pitched the story around, reaching out to bigger, shinier pubs (e.g. Esquire, etc.) I’d not yet attempted to court. But I didn’t know if the focus was on the House, the Preservation, or the relatively unknown and unseen local guy who has wielded Kermit’s reins for over two decades. Nobody bit. Luckily, my work for Longreads early in the year paid off, and I was given an opportunity to pitch a new story. I suggested a profile of Whitmire. They said yes.
Soon, ABC announced the return of The Muppets to prime-time TV in the fall. We missed publishing to coincide with Henson’s anniversary (thankfully — I’d rather celebrate what remains than dredge up memories of what we’ve lost) but instead went live in the lead up to the new television show. My wife and I didn’t get the house. Instead I got 5,000 words. Fair trade.
Consequences
Whether my “writing career” has progressed or remained stagnant in 2015 is hard to say. Money-wise, I’ve made more in the past. But progress can be counted by many vectors; let me suggest that still being here, doing this, is a form of forward momentum.
There were a few moments that felt like breakthrough. I took part in the Digital Writers Festival, a series of online conversations streamed live over the course of two weeks. I also gave my first radio interview on New Hampshire Public Radio, chatting about the 30th anniversary of Super Mario on the program ‘Word of Mouth’ with Virginia Prescott. She was gentle. The six minutes of air-time, whittled down from our twenty minute conversation, did not embarrass. They also served as a reminder that becoming, and presenting yourself as, an expert, no matter the subject, is one avenue toward opportunities.
So is a good, focused pitch. I was this close to spinning that same 30th anniversary into my first piece for Slate. I had the attention of the right editor. I had a chance to pivot or nudge the idea when the first attempt wasn’t quite right. But it didn’t land. Weeks later, another Mario essay went up, by another writer with a firm, relevant, specific purpose. So-called expertise only gets you so far. You need to sell. And you need to know what you’re selling.
Small press Boss Fight Books continues to sell my book, and I just received a third royalty payment. That’s another of those default victories: Regardless of numbers, the presence of “royalties” of any kind is something to be thankful for. (Such blind appreciation is likely anathema to most of you full-timers out there who depend on the numbers I so blithely toss aside. In the coming year, may I learn some of your business savvy and financial toughness.)
And just this past month, Joshua Hillyer had me on his podcast, Digital Writes, to chat about that book and all things writing in the digital age. I often have the sound of strangers’ voices in my ear as I take my daily walk around the neighborhood. It was a pleasure to talk back this time, and have someone listen.
Remedies
“Through generations of neglect this evil has grown until it has become a menace to civilization.” Kellogg is talking about constipation. I daresay “evil” is a touch melodramatic, but did I invent the corn flake? No, I did not. Regardless, 2015 is almost over. Our bowels are filling. Let 2016 be a year of glorious writerly regularity. But health does not come from good intentions alone. One needs to act. To all those long- or short-suffering scribblers selling words for a pittance or an ample sum, I salute you. So that I remain in your company, this is what needs to happen next. I will:
Pitch more and better places. Be more confident. Seek out assignments. Be more honest. Follow-up without pause. Read new voices. Engage with local communities. Never forget to call my mom. Tuck in my wife when she’s asleep. Stop wasting so much time on Twitter. Keep doing this, whatever this is.
And I hope you do too.
*Not the author. But I’m sure he’s written something.
