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allthingslinguistic · 3 years

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How to write a successful pop linguistics book

This is a question that I started getting periodically as soon as Because Internet hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2019, and after a while, I noticed that I was giving very similar advice each time. So I've decided to save time and write down my advice all in once place in greater detail than I can remember to do in a single conversation, and hopefully in the process demystify some of the hidden curriculum around book promotion and platform for the circle beyond people who know me well enough to ask for advice personally.

Disclaimer: This is really long. Think of it as the notes from the hour-long chat that you were hoping to have with me. And hey, you didn't even have to buy me coffee! (If this post is useful and you do end up writing a fabulously successful pop linguistics book, I will happily accept a hot or cold beverage though.)

Disclaimer 2: I've upped the snark level of some of the questions to hopefully make reading an incredibly long advice post somewhat more entertaining. Everyone who has asked me for advice has been much better mannered than this, and some of the strongest objections are things I thought myself at earlier stages. It's just that academia as a whole, and especially tenured professors, sometimes has a bit of an attitude towards other fields, and when you make that subtext text, well.

Disclaimer 3: This is an advice post! It will, therefore, assume that you are dissatisfied to some degree with your current situation (which I'm assuming is broadly speaking academia, somewhere around grad student, recent grad, postdoc, prof) and looking to change it. If you already have tons of people who are fans of your work and would totally buy a book as soon as you wrote it, you probably don't need my advice on how to make your book more popular! If you already have a lucrative and satisfying career outside of academia, you probably don't need advice on developing a different and much more speculative one! There are plenty of paths up the "getting people interested in your work" mountain, and this is not the only one, just the one that in my experience is both well-targeted for pop linguistics and something that you can take concrete actions to pursue.

Disclaimer 4: I'm assuming you want to write pop linguistics here. Much of this advice should work for other kinds of pop science as well, and maybe other subgenres of what the publishing industry calls "serious nonfiction" (which doesn't mean it can't be entertaining, just that it's stuff that's more ideas-based and in the journalism-to-book pipeline, not like, a cookbook), but most of it probably won't apply to fiction. I read a lot of "here's how publishing works" blog posts when I was a new author (strong endorse to Jane Friedman, Kate McKean, and Mary Robinette Kowal's Debut Author Lessons), and many of them were aimed a bit more at fiction, so it's my pleasure to contribute to the genre from the other side, both as nonfiction and as someone who's published a book. This is not a post about the writing or publishing process. There are plenty of other posts elsewhere about how to develop a writing habit, how to write a book proposal, and how to work with publishers and literary agents. You should google for them too. This is a post about the "successful" part: how to get people interested in your pop linguistics writing so that they actually want to buy your book when it comes out.

With all the disclaimers out of the way, here's how this question usually finds me:

Wow, Because Internet did really well! I mean, it was everywhere! You know, I'm a linguist too, and I've also been thinking about writing a pop linguistics book, and I'd really like it to do even half as well, do you have any advice?

If you want to write a nonfiction book, my best advice is to first start out by writing some short pieces. Op-eds, news articles, even guest blog posts. You don't have to start a whole blog or newsletter for yourself, but it might not be the worst idea.

This is not the advice that people who ask me for advice want to hear, but it is the advice that you should take nonetheless. Writing a book has a certain glamour to it. Visions of signing autographs, seeing your book on the shelves of a bookstore, getting to call yourself a "published author." Writing some short pieces can't compete with that. Nonetheless, writing some short pieces for a general audience before you try to write a big long thing for a general audience is a very, very good idea, and here's why.

First, writing a book is hard. It is much, much easier to write an op-ed. An op-ed is maybe 800-1200 words. You could knock that over in a week or two, tops, maybe even a day or two if it's a super newsy subject and you really put your boots on. If you're not willing to spend a few weeks to months writing some op-eds (for which, may I add, you will get paid, although not particularly splendidly), why should anyone believe that you have the stick-to-itiveness to spend years writing a whole book? In academic terms, this would be like trying to write a dissertation before you'd even written any course papers. Also, if you're coming from a technical background, writing some short pieces is excellent practice at figuring out how you need to adjust your writing to make it enjoyable for a non-specialist audience. You'll write a better book if you have experience writing short form and getting relatively quick feedback on it.

Second, publishing a book is hard. It is much, much easier to convince someone to publish your op-ed. Newspapers and news sites have a certain number of slots, and they need to fill them every day. There are a ton more news outlets than book publishers, the amount of time and money at stake for a short piece is much lower than for a whole book, so the whole process is much less involved and they're much more willing to take a chance on an interesting idea from a relative unknown. Which, as you keep doing it for a bit, will make you less of an unknown. Publishers will be more interested in a book from you if you've previously written some short form pieces.

Third, promoting a book is hard. It is much, much easier to convince someone to read your op-ed than a whole book. Once your book is out, if you want people to actually pick it up and read it, you will need to do things like...write op-eds about it and pitch to other people that they might want to write short-form pieces about it. At which point it is valuable to already have experience having written things in this genre — and even better if some people are already aware of you because they liked the short pieces you wrote. People sometimes randomly pick up, say, a mystery novel just because they're in the mood for a mystery and the cover looks intriguing, but that's fiction. For nonfiction, more people will buy and read your book if you've already written some short form.

Uhh, convincing a news site to publish my short article sounds hard. Can't I just start a blog or put up a few pieces on Medium, where I don't have to convince anyone?

It's true that it's harder to convince an editor, who doesn't know anything about linguistics or why it's interesting, to publish your article, compared to putting up on a website you control. And writing a few independent posts isn't a bad idea, especially at first!

But the goal of this entire process is to a) give you practice at articulating what's interesting about linguistics and b) to do so in front of a wider and wider audience. Editors are useful on both of these fronts: they'll spot points where your reader would probably be confused, and they'll help you gain access to a larger audience.

Okay, fine. You've convinced me enough that I'm willing to keep reading. But in that case, HOW do I write an op-ed? Like, should I just write a thousand words and send it in to the New York Times?

(Alternative lead-in question: Now that you mention it, I'm not so sure about this book thing, but I do actually like the idea of writing some short pieces! How would I go about doing that?)

If you want to write for a news-ish-type site, you need to send the appropriate editor a pitch email. A pitch email contains three things:

A brief, snappy description of what you want to write about (the pitch proper)

Indicators that you can actually deliver on the pitch you've proposed (clips)

Anything else that is requested / NOT anything that is specifically UN-requested from that outlet's pitching guidelines (which you will find by googling "how to pitch Name of Outlet" and "pitching guidelines Name of Outlet"). Common requests are things like "use this specific subject line format" or "no more stories about X, we get too many" (good news: linguistics is rarely on that list!).

Bonus optional thing: a follow-up email “just checking in” a week later if your first email doesn’t get a reply. Editors are busy project managers like professors are, they often get behind on email, and it is normal and expected that you might need to ping them in a week if they don’t get back to you about your pitch before then. A week is a normal interval, longer would also not be a problem. They don’t hate you; their job is to deal with pitches (but sometimes all of us get overwhelmed by our jobs).

I assume you can figure out the googling part, but let's break down what the other two things are:

THE PITCH

This is a short description of the specific thing you want to write about, with particular emphasis to why: why it's interesting to readers, why it's relevant to the publication, why you're the one to write about it. It's generally on the order of 1-3 paragraphs long, although pitches should be shorter if they're for a very short piece (if you're pitching for a 150 word "quick hit" piece, your pitch shouldn't be 149 words — or worse, 300 words), and can be longer if they're for a very long piece (though if you're a new writer you won't be pitching 10k word feature stories anytime soon, so this probably won't come up). Honestly, I normally aim for 2-3 sentences for the pitch itself, although there can be other padding pleasantries in the email around it. Academics are especially likely to write pitches that are too long and wordy so thinking of it as like 2-3 tweets or something that wouldn’t look out of place in someone’s DMs is a much better starting point than an academic abstract.

A pitch is different from a topic or area of interest! A topic might be "internet linguistics" or "the development of hashtags". A pitch is a specific, focused proposal for one thing, with explicit information about the perspective you're taking and how you're going to execute on it. It doesn't have to give away the entire ending, and editors do understand that sometimes you learn more as you write a piece, but it should have a strong sense of direction. A pitch is also less about how much you want to write the piece and more about how much the editor’s audience would find the piece interesting and valuable. This is your chance to show you understand the publication and its goals — are they looking for advice? evergreen content? a tie-in to recent events? humour? an authoritative tone? a connection to a specific subject area like music or Canada? Make your pitch do whichever of these things is applicable.

You're not going to write and send the whole piece here — editors accept or reject based on the pitch. This saves you time, and can also affect the direction of the piece. Sometimes, instead of a flat-out acceptance or rejection, an editor will have thoughts on how you could tweak the scope of the piece from the pitch — for example, you mentioned two things, but they'd like you to focus on just one or expand to a broader piece with a third example. (Which is why it's generally not advised to write the whole piece before sending the pitch, as you may be wasting effort, though of course figuring out what you can write based on a pitch is its own learning process.) Cold pitching a new editor is the hardest kind of pitching, but once you've worked with an editor once, or even if they didn't go for a particular pitch but told you to pitch again, you can then gradually move towards a more relaxed kind of pitch.

Here's an example of the pitch portion of the very first email that I sent to The Toast, which became the Benedict Cumberbatch names article.

Ever since Benedict Cumberbatch Day, I've been wanting to write an article for The Toast in which I explain why, say, "Bumbershoot Cheeseburger" is a totally reasonable thing to call him, but "Umbrella Falafel" doesn't sound like him at all. I have acquired all the synonyms from the Benedict Cumberbatch Name Generator through nefarious means (aka "view source"), put them into a spreadsheet, annotated them for various tricksy linguistic factors, and I've love to explain to your readers what I've found.

This isn't a template for every single pitch: I was pretty new to pitching at the time and I might do things a bit differently now, especially depending on the venue (The Toast had a very informal tone, for one thing). But this pitch does indicate several useful things in a short space:

"Ever since Benedict Cumberbatch Day" - I've read your publication and I know how you've covered this subject previously

"I explain why, say, 'Bumbershoot Cheeseburger'...but 'Umbrella Falafel' doesn't" - the core argument/explanation of the piece

"I have acquired...put them into a spreadsheet" - I've done enough preliminary legwork that I'm confident I have something interesting here

"nefarious means (aka 'view source')... tricksy linguistic factors" - this piece is going to mix real research with a fun and lighthearted tone that fits well with the tone of the publication

The best way to get a sense of what an effective pitch looks like is to look at some sample pitches. Fortunately, The Open Notebook has compiled a database of successful scicomm pitches and the resulting news stories — you can look through their list for categories of writing you're interested in trying (I'd start with news and opinion/commentary) and also browse their blog posts about pitching (I'd start with breaking into science writing and pitching errors). It's also useful to follow some editors from publications you think you might like to write for on twitter — you can find them using twitter's search function by putting in "editor" and the twitter handle of the publication (it may help to restrict your search to people). It's not uncommon for editors to tweet about what they're looking for, and at the very least it'll give you an idea of the kinds of stories they're publishing.

One other thing you can also do, especially when you’re sending pitches to your first few entry-level places, is try sending 2-3 short pitches (no more than one paragraph) per email. I wouldn’t do it for someplace really fancy like the New York Times, but for a guest blog post type situation it may be easier on both you and the editor for them to be able to say “yes, that one” rather than you having to send three separate emails and potentially get 2/3 of them rejected.

THE CLIPS

Let's get in the head of an editor for a minute. They've read your snappy pitch, and they're intrigued! This sounds like a fascinating story that their readers would love!

Now, the question comes into the editor's brain: okay, but can the person on the other side of this email actually write an engaging article about this story? Or is it going to be overwrought, too jargon-y, needing tons of edits and rewrites in order to be publishable?

Part of the way you're going to convince the editor is the pitch itself — if it's engagingly-written, then hopefully the story will be too. But the other part is from your clips. That is, a small number of writing samples (probably 2-4 links) that show what your writing is like. If you wrote these other 3 pieces that are pretty readable, goes the editor's brain, then probably you can write a fourth, similar piece.

Okay, but wait. I'm supposed to use clips to get editors to approve of me, but I need editors to approve of me to get clips. Isn't this a catch-22 spiral? Can't I send my academic CV instead?

No and OMG NO.

The way you get out of the spiral is that there are places you can write for that you control, rather than an editor. Places like a blog, newsletter, or Medium. If you have some kind of connection, such as if you're at a university that has one or more blogs, newsletters, or student/alumni publications, you may also be able to get a nepotistic guest post there without a writing sample, but really, your own thing is fine. (Don't just write them for yourself and attach them as pdfs, no one likes getting attachments from strangers and also putting them somewhere public is also a way of letting random drivers-by of your social media pages know that you might be open for freelance writing work.)

Now, obviously a big fancy publication like the New York Times is probably not going to accept a few blog posts as clips, unless you're an exceedingly famous blogger. (In which case you really don't need my advice here.) But you also don't need to wait until you're a super established blogger, unless you're having fun doing your own thing or you can feel that you're still actively on the learning curve on your own. Write a few posts, pick the two or three that you feel are the strongest, most similar in style to the piece you're pitching, or that got the best response when you shared them with your friends on social media, and use that as your first clips.

You're going to want to aim for the most friendly, approachable layer of publications with your amateur clips. These are publications that occupy a particular niche, rather than being general-interest like big national newspapers, and ideally it's a niche that you (or your proposed article topic) also occupies. For linguists, an obvious niche is "publications that are already fully onboard with language being interesting" (my first paid clip was for Grammar Girl, which fits here). Academics sometimes go for The Conversation, which deliberately caters to academics (and doesn't pay, but that can be tolerable once or twice for a first clip), though I've heard it's gotten harder to get a story accepted here than it used to be when they were less well known, so don't feel like you have to go there just because you're in academia. If your linguistics story overlaps with science, you could check out some of the more accessible publications listed in this Open Notebook post. If your story overlaps with hobbyist topics (sci fi, birdwatching, food) or identity topics (race, gender, sexuality) you could pick somewhere that's interested in that topic and see if they might like a linguistics angle — heck, I got my first clip for The Toast because I knew from reading it that one of its editors was a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch and I happened to have a linguistics tie-in, on the strength of one clip from my blog and one from Grammar Girl. Local news might also qualify here, especially if the story you're pitching has a direct tie to something of local interest, though depending on how large your area is, it might also be a step or two up (sorry, New York). Company blogs or trade publications can also work here, and can actually end up paying fairly well, though they may not let you get as fun and weird as the lower-paying niche indie blogs.

A good heuristic for whether a publication is approachable is also whether you'd expect all your friends and family to have heard of it, especially if they're not part of that particular niche or not very online. If your sentence starts "so there's this blog/website/podcast about…" and your friend is going "uh-huh, okay, sure?" that's probably a good sign. If you just say the name of the publication and expect everyone to know exactly what you mean, that's too fancy, take a step down.

So, you pitch a few friendly niche publications, especially ones that you were already reading. You write a few pieces for them, forming a bit of a relationship with editors, learning more about how to write, and building clips. You might have fun hanging out around here for a while, as you can often write stuff that's nicher and weirder than you can write for more mainstream publications! It's also perfectly fine to stay here indefinitely if you're in it more for enjoying what you write about than trying to develop a journalism career or portfolio as a freelance writer! Niche is by no means an insult — it can be a fun, relatively low-stakes place to hang out as a writer, and as a reader some of my favourite, internet classic stories have been published by more niche publications.

But if you do want to move to something fancier, your next target can be something around a medium level of approachability. Some examples in this group are a) web publications for a general readership (skewing younger) or b) local print publications without a ton of web footprint or footprint outside the area (skewing older). Web-first publications are places like Slate, Vox, The Verge, Buzzfeed, and so on; your local area will, of course, depend. Basically, these are places that some people you know have probably heard of, but probably not everyone. They're on the radar of lots of budding journalists, so it's easier to stand out from the crowd by having clips from somewhere else with some level of editorial oversight, even if that place isn't as fancy. (And in fact, having a few clips from places with zero-to-minimal editing can actually give an editor a really good idea of what your piece is likely to be like before it's edited, which some of them really like.)

You can also stick around at this level! Some writers make perfectly decent careers out of writing for places like Slate or Buzzfeed! If you get an editor you like, you might just want to keep working with them! But for a lot of freelance writers, it's useful to aim for at least a few clips from the fanciest tier of publications, if only as a status signal to editors at the mid-level, meat and potatoes level of publications that they might want to pay you more.

The highest layer of publications is roughly national-level publications (which are also read to at least some degree internationally) and which have substantial presences both online and in print. To be honest, I didn't fully crack this layer until I already had a book coming out, so I don't actually think this level is necessary before you start thinking of a book if you're really keen on writing one. But that was partly also because I didn't have time for much short-form writing when I was actively working on the book, so I had to take a raincheck from some editors who approached me while I was working on it. In either case, it was my writing for mid-tier and niche publications (in my case, Slate and The Toast) that led to both interest from literary agents and publishers in a book from me, and also to interest from editors of fancier publications (Wired, NYT).

Do some deep googling of any short-form writer you admire and you'll see that they were writing for more obscure places before you started hearing about them — even the ones who primarily mention their academic or book-writing credentials in their bios. In fact, those more obscure places that a journalist you admire used to write for are a great way of compiling a list of more accessible places you could also pitch. It's important to keep in mind that when you're writing for the public, you're not an academic who's "slumming it" — you're a person attempting to join one or more other industries (journalism and/or publishing). It's relatively common to learn journalistic skills on the job with a background in something else, much more common than the formal requirements of academia, but that doesn't mean there aren't still skills and trajectories. The reason why I'm spending all this time on journalistic skills, even for people who are hell-bent on books, is that there's a much bigger pipeline between journalism and popular nonfiction books than there is between academia and nonfiction books that make a popular splash without spending some time with journalism.

Okay, but I've tried pitching pieces to places, and they didn't go for them!

Without knowing you or the pitches, I can't say for sure, but I have three suggestions:

Did you actually pitch pieces to places, or did you pitch one piece to one place once? Rejection is part of the game here, and a certain amount of it is to be expected. If you're getting a reply like "not this topic, but do feel free to pitch us again on a different one" that's actually quite positive and you should take them up on that! Same if you get an email address of an editor and they express vague interest — now it’s your job to pitch them something specific!

You pitched somewhere too fancy for your level of notability/writing, try pitching a notch or two less fancy (or just to a different place or person in case you've accidentally been emailing a defunct email address, there could be all sorts of administrative reasons going on behind the scenes that have nothing to do with you, but the only thing you can really do about it is try somewhere else).

Your writing isn't quite convincing or compelling enough yet, try writing on a blog or somewhere else you control and pay attention to which things people respond to. Asking a non-linguist friend for feedback or trying writing exercises like up-goer five or "half and half again" might also be useful.

You keep saying op eds, but, I dunno, that sounds a little sketchy to me. I'm not trying to write an opinion piece, I'm actually an expert in my own field, if I'm going to do this whole news pitching thing, shouldn't I be writing some other style?

I get it, I used to be confused too, but op eds/opinion is actually exactly where subject matter experts belong, at least at first. The big difference between an op ed and a conventional news piece is that conventional news is reported. That means that the journalist goes out and talks to various people, such as experts on the topic, official sources, people who've experienced something relevant, and so on, and then compiles all of this new stuff they've learned as a non-expert into an article. This takes a lot of skill of its own, respect to any journalists who have gotten this far reading this post, but it's a different prospect from "hey, I know a lot about this topic and I'd like to make a case for this particular aspect of it". If you're coming from academia, you're more likely to be in the subject matter expert category — if you're able to assert analyses of complex topics on your own authority, from your own understanding of the field rather than calling up an expert to analyze it for you, you want to be hanging out in the op ed section.

Now, eventually you might find yourself itching to go out and do reporting, especially once you've written about all the low-hanging fruit that you have more direct expertise with, and in that case you can absolutely shift over to more conventional reported journalism, but for starters, op ed/opinion is exactly where you belong. Plus, even though you still need a pitch and clips, editors for op ed/opinion sections are more likely to be open to working with writers who are new to them. This section is increasingly being rebranded as "ideas" which in my opinion makes its purpose much clearer, especially as online it's no longer meaningful to say that something is opposite the editorial page (the origin of "op ed").

Actually, maybe I'm intrigued. How realistic would it be for me to maybe try to make this a proper career path? Like, how much money are we talking for short-form pieces, anyway?

This is the part where I issue the disclaimer that I don't fully know what it's like as a career, because I've never done exclusively freelance journalism writing for an extended period of time. What I can say from experience is that writing short-form pieces fits well with a portfolio public-facing career that contains lots of different parts (in my case, book, podcast, blog, speaking, etc) because the timeframes are really flexible, you can dip into and out of it as you have time among other things, and it can put you on the radar of a lot of interesting people.

There are absolutely people who make a career out of freelance writing though, especially if you're a faster writer than I am. My sense is that, while the overall pay and workload at first might not be a whole lot better than adjuncting in academia, the occupational prestige and potential for growth is a lot better: freelance writing is a respected, known type of experience for other writing jobs (staff writer, editor, book deals) in a way that's opposite to how being an adjunct traps you in a loop of never having enough time for research to become eligible for a research job. If you're interested in making a job of freelance writing, I'd suggest following freelance writers on twitter, especially in domains like #scicomm and #sciwri, plus resources like The Writer's Co-op and Who Pays Writers.

Okay, I get that you followed this process when you didn't know anyone, but I know you, right? Can't you just like, introduce me to your editor?

I do, believe it or not, actually get versions of this question that are only slightly more subtle. The problem is, if someone has few enough clues to be asking it, then I literally can't do anything for them in their present state. I can't send someone to my Wired editor who doesn't have any clips and who's never written a pitch email. I just can't. It would be like trying to recommend someone for a PhD program who hasn't done a Bachelor's degree. It wouldn't work, and I'd be the one who looked foolish — and worse, it would mean that my endorsement wouldn't carry as much weight when someone comes along who has actually done the legwork.

I typically do suggest to people that they try writing for somewhere more niche to start out, whether that's a blog of their own or pitching a more approachable publication, from which it is absolutely possible to build a portfolio that gets you somewhere fancier, but if I can't say to an editor "here's so-and-so, they've written these three absolutely delightful pieces which are in line with the tone of your publication" then there's no point in me even starting the email. (But if someone has already written three delightful pieces, they've probably written at least a dozen less skilled pieces as practice, and in the process has possibly also picked up that a better question to be asking is "I've written for X and Y so far, and I'm interested in topics like Z. Do you have any suggestions on where I might want to pitch next?" This is the version of the question I or another person with experience might actually be able to help you with! However, at the end of the day, it’s still going to involve you actually writing the pitches in an email, hence why I’ve written this incredibly long advice post about how to do that part.)

Knowing the email address of an editor isn't the useful part. I really do like introducing people, but I have an iron-clad rule that I only make introductions when I am confident that both parties will be happy about them. A referral is most useful when there's evidence to back it up. Editors get tons of emails they ignore and pitches that they reject. The rejections are, to some extent, just part of the game. But you can minimize the number of rejections you get — and maximize the number of pieces you actually get to write and learn from — by working your way up an approximate ladder of prestige rather than mule-headed-ly aiming for the top and only the top. You don't expect to become the vice president of a big company as your first job out of school. Journalism also has a pathway, and that pathway goes from niche to mainstream via pitching.

Okay, fine, but what if I have some other kind of expertise? Do I really need to work my way up entirely via other kinds of freelance writing? Aren't there exceptions?

Look, it's not impossible. If you develop a reputation in another field, you can sometimes port over a degree of that reputation into short-form writing. But you'll still generally need something resembling a pitch and clips in some form.

For example, if you're already a university professor, you may be able to start around the mid tier, especially with local or regional news publications which often like having ties with local universities (make friends with your university's press officer or PR person for contacts). It's still useful to have at least one writing sample, holy internet just have at least something you can point to, which shows that you can write in an accessible and interesting way, because the biggest worry that editors have about professors is that they'll be dry and jargon-filled. But there's definitely a genre of "I'm a Professor of Recent News Story Topic, and Here's What People Are Getting Wrong About It", and you could possibly write something in it for local news. (I believe the Op Ed Project has resources and training for profs in this direction.)

If you're thinking about trying to make yourself into more of a public intellectual, the kind of generalist academic who has a column they write about various topics in their field on a regular basis, you might be able to get an ongoing feature in a friendly-level publication, but I would expect that you'd still need to do some leapfrogging from one publication to the next before getting something like this in a fancy publication. And even then, you're going to be sending some kind of pitch email to your editor for every column that you write, even if it's a more relaxed sentence or two like "hey, I'm thinking of doing this month's column on X, I'm thinking of looking at it from the direction of Y, maybe with a bit about Z as well" once you have an ongoing relationship. The pitch is the basic first unit that the whole industry runs on! Don't be afraid of the pitch!

Where a book really fits in this process is in letting you jump maybe half a level, maybe a whole level, depending on how well-received the book is. But what it means to jump half a level varies a lot depending on what level you start with! If you haven't written for anywhere at all in short-form, a book might let you jump past the part of developing a solo blog and into niche friendly publications or regional news. If you've written for a few smaller places, a book might help you jump solidly into mid-tier. In my case, a book did help me get from mid-tier to well-known publications, but it was building on a foundation of me having already written a bunch of solid mid-tier pieces and learning how the system worked. (And I might even have gotten there faster by pitching directly, if I hadn't been distracted for several years by...writing that same book.)

The surest way to shortcut this entire process is by becoming super famous, famous enough that a publication will be so thrilled to have your name in print that they're willing to extensively edit — almost ghostwrite — whatever it is that you want to say for them. But I don't really consider a process that begins "Step 1: Become famous" to be particularly useful or replicable advice, so I will not be devoting more time to it here.

But I've been quoted in some media! Journalists approach me for comment sometimes, surely that means that editors would think I'm interesting too?

Ye-es, maybe, with some reservations. To use an academic example, journalists view sources kind of like how professors view students: Are they an essential component of the system? Absolutely. Do they have a complete view of how the system works? Absolutely not. If your student says to you that they want to become a professor, you'd be able to describe a fairly detailed set of steps for them to take, but you definitely wouldn't just be handing them an entire course to teach next semester, let alone an office and the keys to a lab. Similarly, if you've been developing a good rapport with a journalist who's interviewing you for an article, they may be able to give you some useful advice about whether there are any places they'd suggest you pitch or general advice they might have, but they're likely not in a position to offer you a writing gig on the spot — that's an editor's job, and it might not even be their editor, depending on whether they're a freelancer or a staffer.

If you're an academic, it's probably much easier to get yourself quoted as an expert in a news story than it is to publish a whole piece of your own, because in the second case you're trying to join a whole new industry with its own norms that you haven't learned yet. So don't be offended if the journalist suggests somewhere that they used to write for, which is maybe a notch or two lower in prestige than the publication they're interviewing you for.

Same goes for if you've done lingcomm in some other area, such as a podcast, a youtube channel, public lectures, and so on. It's certainly not a bad thing to have a track record showing that you can talk interestingly about linguistics! It's just also not exactly the same as having a track record showing that you can write interestingly about linguistics. You might be able to bulk out a first pitch or two with an interview ("I've written for X, and I've been interviewed for Y and Z"), but generally speaking, editors are looking for clips from the same genre, which means writing for the public. Where other formats are more likely to help you is as the first step in a longer sequence: an editor comes across you in a podcast (say), then follows a link to your pop ling writing, and thinks ah, maybe this person would like to write for us too!

Okay, but you mentioned that some editors approached you. That sounds way better than pitching! How do I get editors to approach me? I could do a great job!

You're not going to like this one. It involves...clips and pitching.

A thing that started happening to me after I had written for my first few places is that I started occasionally getting emails from editors at other places. Those emails would generally say a longer version of "Hey, I'm an editor at X, and I really like your pieces at Y. You know, if you have any more ideas that might suit us at X, I'd love to hear from you." This is delightful, don't get me wrong, and it does feel really good (and is part of what makes me think that there is still a ton of appetite for good pop linguistics, because there have been more of these than I've been able to fulfill).

But notice how this email is still the same clips + pitching, just inverted. It was still me having written something elsewhere that provided the writing sample that made the editor think I might be able to write something good for them, and I would still need to follow up by actually coming up with a topic and pitching it to them, which still they might not go for! (This has happened.)

Sometimes, an editor will actually come up with a topic that they think I might be able to write about, which you'd think would be great, but is actually not necessarily all that helpful, because then you have a whole back and forth about how to flesh out this vague idea they've had, which still might not work out. (While it is very helpful for the editing process itself that editors have the same minimal knowledge of linguistics as the general public, it doesn't necessarily lead to them coming up with topics that a linguist would be excited to write about. Plus, this only happens when you've written enough articles that an editor can have a good sense of what you can write about, which... oh hey it's our old friend clips again.)

And the thing is, while I do sometimes manage to pass on editors I don't have time for, the problem is that if an editor has approached me because they like my pieces X and Y, I need to be able to send them to someone else who's written these other great pieces A and B (even if it was only on their own blog or for somewhere relatively niche). I can refer someone for an interview based on other interviews I've seen with them, maybe even just based on talking with them, but I can't refer someone for writing without clips.

If you have experience with academia, you can think of it as like an academic conference. It's true that conferences will invite plenary speakers, that departments will invite people to give talks, and that people organizing a panel will invite others to be on it. But the way you get any of those invitations is through already being a person who does talks at conferences, for which you need to submit an abstract. You don't get invites to the fancy things until you're already doing the thing at a lower level. Pitching is to journalism what submitting an abstract is to academic conferences, and a clip is along the lines of "Oh I saw this person's poster/talk/paper, they'd be totally relevant to our panel."

I know that a new format can be scary and it feels easier to keep doing what you're already doing, which you can absolutely do if you're satisfied with the results it's currently bringing you! But if you're trying to break into pop linguistics writing, especially short form, and you're wondering why all of your other lingcomm in other formats isn't bringing you there, especially when other people seem to be combining the two no problem, well, the answer is something that other people are doing behind the scenes: pitching and clips.

But I don't want to become a journalist, I want to write a book! I have this academic press which says they'd be interested in putting my book in their general audience section. They've even got this short introductory series that they want me to write a book for!

Look, I mean, I can't stop you. You don't actually need my permission to do anything. But since you're reading my advice post…

My experience with academic presses, even their pop arms, is that they're mostly good at getting you academic points within academia, not with actually reaching an audience of any size. If you have a tenure-track job that's already paying you a decent living and you mostly need the academia points, look, I get it, go for it. But if you're looking for anything other than academia points from your book, like money or readers (which are entirely legitimate things to want!), I don't recommend them. What I've heard about academic presses is that even when you like the editor you're working with and are proud of the book you end up producing with them, they just don't have the publicity staff or budget to do things like send out advance copies to journalists and podcasters so that you have a hope of getting reviews of your book in places that people might hear about it. This means that a) you won't make real money off an academic-press book and b) you won't have much of an impact on the non-academic discourse with one.

Special note about those academic short series, like "A very short introduction" and all of its copycat series: they're not an exception here! I've been idly tracking this type of book ever since 2013 when a publisher first approached me about writing one, and I've never once seen a review of one (even just a blog post), received marketing materials from publishers about one, nor received a personal-ish recommendation from anyone to read one. In fact, all of these things have been more likely to happen to me for regular pop crossover books from an academic press! The very detailed guidelines may make it feel like an easier, paint-by-numbers book, and it may make sense for you to write one for other reasons (academia points), but I cannot suggest these series as a way of getting your name out there for pop writing unless you already have your own capacity to promote them.

At any rate, your best chance of breaking out into popular consciousness from an academic press is if people have already heard of you somehow, for something other than your book but related enough to your book that they think "hmm, this person again? with a book? great!". Which takes us back to writing for news places, even if you do go with the academic press. (It’s also, you know, completely okay to write an academic book or so to get your academic job security if you can, and then change gears and write one or more pop books! They’re not mutually exclusive! But this is a post about the pop side.)

That being said, working with a mainstream "trade" press is not a guarantee that they'll do a good job on publicity, but they'll at least give you a fighting chance. At minimum, you can probably expect a mainstream publisher to produce advance copies of your book and send it out in good time to the trade magazines (Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal) as well as any journalists or influencers who you can attract on your own steam. You as a general book-buying person may not really know or care about the trade reviews, but they're super important to booksellers and librarians in deciding what to stock, which has a big trickle-down effect in terms of what people see on shelves. A trade press should also assign you a publicist who tries to pitch your book to media (send advance copies to journalists, try to pitch you as an interview guest or op-ed writer). Whether the publicist actually gets any uptake from this pitching process depends on a lot of things, including how busy the news cycle is with other stuff (sorry, pandemic authors), whether the people they're pitching to already recognize your name or think your topic is interesting from a cursory glance, and how many books the publicist has been assigned to do the same publicity for at the same time.

In any case, you will need to allocate your own time and effort to doing publicity. If you have an awesome publicist and tons of uptake, you will need to allocate time to actually doing the interviews or writing the op-eds that you've been pitched for. If you end up needing to do more of your own publicity, add the pitching itself to that list. Hey look, we're back at why you should write some short pieces for news places before trying to write a book, because if you want media to cover the book when it comes out, you'll need to understand how news pitching works anyway. Pitching a normal story is pitching on easy mode compared to pitching "hey I wrote a book that you should be interested in". Plus, if you have already written short form, you'll have some amount of network from that: editors you worked with, other journalists who were writing for the same place at the same time (follow people from your publications on twitter and if your common byline is in your bio they might follow you back!), and generally people who read and liked your short pieces when they came out.

(For some "be careful what you wish for" context, my publicist for Because Internet was fantastic, and when it came out, I did 200 media interviews that year, over half of which were in the two months surrounding the book's release, plus several op-eds, a few events, and general social media. Promoting the book was my full-time job for about 3 months, and my part-time job for several months on either side of that, and that's with really excellent support from my publisher. I don't regret doing it, but what you're wishing for when you're wishing for a lot of book promotion is 200 people asking "So, why did you write this book?" and you sounding excited about answering every time. This advice post is about the process of getting to a position where dozens of media outlets are interested in responding to that "hey, would you like to cover this book?" email in the first place.)

Whew, this whole caring about publishers thing sounds like a lot of work! What about self-publishing? I hear that's all the rage now.

Self-publishing can be good for some genres, especially fiction. I think it may also work quite well for very practical advice (programming, business) if you already have a platform where you give such advice.

For popular science, no. Don't touch it. Pop science is an authority genre, and I just don't see a way to self-publish a book containing your theories about X in a way that doesn't make you look like a crank. Perhaps it's an unfortunate stereotype, but all I hear in my head when I think "self-published pop linguistics book" is "let me tell you about my theory of how all the languages are descended from aliens". Either self-publish in a shorter format (running your own blog, podcast, youtube channel, etc is fine! I don't know why the reputation economy works like this but it does!) or go back up to academic presses, at least they won't give you negative reputation points. The only exception I can think of here is if you’re self-publishing something like a dictionary or teaching materials where you’re just using print-on-demand as an easier way of getting a little print run for a small community-focused project, which while an excellent and worthwhile thing to do is not something for which you’d be trying to promote to a huge audience in the first place.

Besides, self publishing is actually setting up your own independent business, and if you don't like the idea of doing your own promotion, hoo boy do I have some bad news for you about just how much self-promotion is involved in self-publishing, in addition to literally all of the other business skills. Hope you like wrangling Kindle's highly specific formatting requirements! Again, some people like this and do a great job at it, it can totally work for other genres, but my imaginary academic or academia-adjacent linguist reading this piece already has a zillion other things on their plate and doesn't need to start another sideline.

You've talked a lot about pitching media, but should I also be promoting my book on social media? How???

Yes, somewhat. Definitely make some posts on your existing social media, whatever you have, letting your friends and followers know that you've written a book, and most importantly, what your book is about.

Let me elaborate. I can't even tell you how many times I've gotten a tweet retweeted into my timeline that says "My book is out today! Wow, it's been such a long journey getting here and I'm so excited to finally share it with you, thank you all for your support!!! [LINK TO BOOK]"

This is all very nice, and maybe it makes sense to people who have been following you for years, but the problem is that when you make a book tweet like this, lots of these people who have been following you for years will supportively retweet it. This is also very nice of them, but then I, a random person who doesn't follow you, see it in my timeline because I follow one of your friends and I think "oh that's nice, my friend knows someone who's written a book". But I don't know whether this book is fiction or nonfiction, young adult or academic, let alone anything that might give me a clue whether I might want to click on the link. Are there dragons? Are there linguists? Are there both linguists and dragons? No one is telling me, and there are a lot of links on this here internet, and so in all likelihood I will just keep scrolling.

Instead, you need to write a retweetable tweet, like a little mini pitch in 280 characters: "My book, WORDS OF FIRE, is out today! I'm so excited to share the adventures of Glossa, the time-travelling linguist dragon, and her sidekick Diacritic. Give it to any YA readers, fantasy fans, or linguistics enthusiasts you know! [LINK]"

Honestly I just wrote this description as a demo and now *I* want this book.

It's really hard to write a 280-character description of your book that you poured years and tens of thousands of words into. It's really hard and you need to do it anyway. The good news is, you can get help. Maybe your publisher will make a good blurb that you can borrow, or one of your blurbers will produce a good quote that sums up the book, and you can definitely workshop potential descriptions with your friends and even followers. In the leadup to your book being out, you can try out various ways of describing it to see which ones make people's eyes light up, and then reuse that for your biggest please-retweet-this tweet.

At minimum, for retweet's sake, you need to refer to your book as "TITLE OF BOOK" rather than just as "the book". If it's nonfiction, it probably also has a descriptive subtitle. Put the subtitle in the tweet too. I know, it's in your head as "the book". Mine is too. But you need other people to recognize and remember the name of the book when they come across it or want to recommend it to someone, and that means getting in the habit of referring to your book by its actual name. Plus, this will come in handy if you ever write a second book and need to distinguish them!

People don't buy a book just because you wrote it, except for maybe a small handful of your closest friends. People buy a book because it looks interesting, or it looks like it'll help them with a problem they have, or because they enjoyed previous things you made and this one looks similar.

So, you need to articulate this: what's in your book that might be interesting or helpful to someone? Writers are often reluctant to do things that might appear "salesy" because we all have seared into our memories the times that other people were salsey in an extremely awkward, clunky way. So, yes, don't imitate the bad salespeople! What we don't tend to even register as sales is that time that a super relevant and interesting thing happened to cross our paths at the exact right moment and we were delighted to find out about it. Instead, think: who are some people that would be delighted to find out about your book, and how can you a) come across their paths and b) signal to them that they're in the right place? For your own social media, you're already across some people's paths, so you just need to do the signalling part. What in your book will make people delighted to read it?

However, while it's a good idea to tell people on your social media what your book is about, and do it several times so that they don't miss it, it can be a long, hard slog to build up a substantial audience on social media, and people generally won't follow a feed that's entirely promotional, so you also need to come up with a mix of compelling posts about things that are similar enough to your book but not directly selling it, and that takes effort (not necessarily less effort than pitching a few pieces for bigger audience!).

If coming up with witty memes about linguistics or livetweeting your favourite linguistics articles with commentary is your idea of an enjoyable Friday night, hey, welcome, I hope I'm already following you on Linguistics Twitter? So I'm definitely not saying don't do fun social media posts about linguistics (which would be extremely hypocritical of me), and I'm definitely not saying that if you do manage to accumulate a decent following you shouldn't tell them about your book (if I'm following you and you've written a book or even just an article, I want to know about it!), I'm just saying that if you're only on social media to promote your book, if you suddenly start posting to a long-dormant account the same day your book comes out, or if you're expecting social media to be a primary source of buyers for your book without doing any other ways of reaching people, I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

The thing is, even if you do have a decent following, only some percentage of them will actually pay money for something from you, whether it's a book or a witty t-shirt or supporting your patreon or whatever (Patreon estimates that 1-5% of fans are likely to convert to patrons. I don't know if anyone's done a similar stat for book sales but I'd be shocked if it was as high as 20%). So that means that if you have, say, 10,000 followers (which is really quite a lot!), you're selling them maybe 100-1000 copies of your book, and probably on the lower end of that. Sure, if you have like, a million followers, that percentage could add up nicely, but I really have no idea how you go about getting a million followers for Quality Linguistics Content, please let me know if you figure it out. Which is to say, you need to think of multiple ways of coming across the paths of people who might be interested in your book (some of whom will probably turn around and follow you on social media, which does make promoting your subsequent projects easier.)

So if social media isn't the be-all, end-all, does that mean I should start a podcast instead to promote my book? Or maybe a youtube channel? What about a TikTok, I hear people are into TikTok?

Okay, okay, hold your horses. Starting all three at once would be biting off a bit too much, but you could certainly do one of these if it appeals to you. The thing is though, like with twitter or instagram or any other social media, starting up a linguistics media project is also best viewed as a long game. It takes time to develop a following, time in which you need to be posting other things that are also interesting because no one wants to follow a feed that's entirely promotional. (Yes, even for TikTok, even if the fabled algorithm mysteriously picks you up for one video, it can drop you down just as hard again if people don't like your others.) If making content for one of these channels appeals to you generally speaking, then developing a following is certainly not a bad thing for selling a few more copies! It just also might not be the most bang for your buck thing that you could be doing with that time.

But like, what else can I do to promote my book besides trying to build a following online? What else is there?

Social media sites want us to think that the way to get people's attention is by getting followers on their platforms. But that's not the only option. Please allow me to introduce you to a small bit of helpful jargon from the world of public relations and marketing. The three kinds of media are: owned media, paid media, and earned media.

Owned media is the platforms you control. Largely social media and website traffic, these days, though if you have a well-travelled physical location, putting up a sign or a poster where people would see it also counts (this is how, for example, most yard sales do marketing). It's the most durable once you have it, but it's also the hardest to build. (And a social media algorithm change can cut it in half overnight, so that's fun.)

Paid media is advertising. Pretty straightforward, I think we've all been advertised to, at the most basic level it's just someone paying for access to someone else's audience. Most books don't have huge ad campaigns unless the author is already really famous, so the light version that generally happens instead is sending out free copies to people with large social media followings and hoping that they like it enough to talk about it.

Earned media is the non-obvious name, and it's the most interesting of the three. Earned media is when you earn free media by doing something so interesting that a journalist notices and decides "hey, I need to cover that!" (This is the strategy behind the tactic of things like marches and protests — if a journalist sees a ton of people with signs in the street, they're going to think "I wonder what's going on?" and also "other people are going to wonder what's going on" which adds up to "we should cover this".) So, yes, you still need to be interesting, but the rewards are potentially much greater for being interesting to a journalist or two than they are for just being interesting to people generally on social media.

These three types of media aren't mutually exclusive, either. In particular, being covered by someone else's media can bring in more social media followers, and doing something interesting on social media can sometimes bring in the attention of conventional media. But you don't have to wait around passively in hopes of media attention — you can also be more direct about looking for media coverage.

Right, so in that case, how do I actually get media to talk about my book?

A time-tested way to get your book in front of a large audience is to borrow one from someone else. Preferably several different medium to large audiences of people who are interested in the general category of things your book is related to. Other audiences can include people with larger followings on social media, sure, but it can also include indie-ish web things like podcasts, blogs, and newsletters, and conventional media, especially print/web and radio (there's not a lot of book-related TV in English-speaking areas, but radio apparently sells books a ton).

The tricky thing is that, the larger the audience a person controls, the more other people are trying to also get their things — their books, their startups, their kickstarters — in front of the same audience. You can mitigate against this by being more targeted — if your book is about linguistics, you could try pitching linguistics blogs or linguistics podcasts (Superlinguo has a list here), but also consider expanding a circle or two outwards, into general pop science or "interesting things" blogs/newsletters/podcasts (there are many more of them, they don't hear from linguists as often, and they may have larger audiences, but they're still not necessarily as inundated as major international newspapers).

Another way to mitigate against this is by having a compelling pitch. (By the way, it's also really helpful to have a track record that makes the person receiving your pitch email perk up and say "oh! the person who made Other Thing! I like Other Thing!", which is why you should, say it with me, start with short form writing first. At the very least, if you get some early media requests for interviews before you've finished the book, make sure you take them even if you don't think the outlet is particularly fancy — they're good practice for you, plus budding journalists often go on to work for fancier places a few years later. But media is most likely to find you to interview through other media pieces, of which the only piece that you can really control is, again, whether or not you pitch places.)

You make a compelling pitch by doing your homework — what else has this person or platform covered? How does your thing fit into it? We've gotten some hilariously mistargeted pitches for Lingthusiasm for people who are clearly just sending out a generic podcast pitch to a whole long list. You can do better than that. (Protip: if a podcast rarely or never does interviews, your proposal to be a guest is much less likely to succeed than one where they're putting out a new interview every week — that's just math.) Of course, you should also check to see if the person or publication has any publicly posted pitching guidelines, and if so, follow them.

You also need to, you know, actually send the pitch. You make a list of people who you know who already follow you and maybe have a larger audience than you do who you wish would talk about your book, and then you actually figure out the way they prefer to be contacted and ask them if they'd be interested in a copy of your book. Yes, it's awkward. My experience is that generally people are pretty nice about it though, if you're not a complete random to them, and the worst that is likely to happen is just...no reply. Or they do take a copy and never get around to it. You can live with that. You do this before your book comes out, preferably months before, so they actually have time to read it. Not the same week it's coming out. And really not after it's already come out. That's why your publisher produces advance copies in the first place, so potential reviewers can get it, you know, in advance. There aren't really all that many perks to reviewing other people's books — it takes hours to read a whole book and everyone suffers from "so many books, so little time" — so the two main reasons people do it are for the benefit of the whole ecosystem that they're a part of and because it enables you to find out what's going on in a book no one has read yet! The further you are away from pub date, the more alluring that is as an offer.

Again, learning how to pitch editors on an individual story is pitching on easy mode compared to pitching your whole book. And writing some short form pieces — op-eds, guest blog posts — about topics that are related to your book or an adapted excerpt from your book is a primary way of demonstrating to prospective readers that they'll get a similarly interesting or enjoyable experience when reading it. I don't really understand how publicity for fiction works at all, and it seems to me that it must be very difficult, because nonfiction is extremely heavily reliant on the journalism-to-book pipeline (and while short stories do exist, they're much less common than news articles). Here's a simplified version of that pipeline:

Person reads article

Person thinks "wow, that was super interesting!"

Person thinks "where can I learn even more about this?"

Person sees at bottom of article "this person has also written a related book"

Person buys book

In reality, it might be more like:

Person sees three interviews, an article, and a review related to a book

Each time, person is slightly more interested

Person sees someone else they sorta know on social media talking about the book

Person comments "oh, I've been hearing about that book, how are you finding it?"

Other person says "omg it's so great!!"

Original person actually buys it

But you get the idea. People generally need to hear about a book (or anything you're trying to sell them on) from a variety of different sources on different days to be convinced to buy it. So your job is figuring out how to get upstream of those different sources, to get into the kinds of things that people don't take as much convincing to check out, like a short written thing or a podcast they're already listening to (even then, think of all the podcasts you've heard of and not listened to, or the links you scroll past on a given day and don't click).

That's why so much of book promotion is about reducing the barriers for people with an audience to check out a book, by trying to get free copies in the hands of bookstore employees, journalists, bloggers, podcasters, booktubers, and generally anyone with a following, who can seed that feeling of a personal recommendation that converts random members of the public from "someone who's heard of a book" to "someone who buys the book". One someone loves a book, it's hard to get them to shut up about it! But everyone who gets sent books for professional purposes can tell you that they get, in the most "I'm on this lovely yacht and my free drink is the wrong temperature" of problems, too many free books to review. "So many books, so little time" doesn't go away when the books are free (as anyone who has access to a library can attest). For nonfiction to get media attention, your best bet as a non-famous person is to have a book on a compelling topic that media wants to cover, for which they can then interview you as an expert. But also! You don't have to be mega-superstar-famous in order to be somewhat well known for a few articles in a niche, which is a good start.

So, I buy that I need to promote my book somehow using other, shorter, things. But couldn't I just skip to doing this media pitching step for my book directly without trying to do short form writing myself first?

Or, couldn't I just create my own blog or podcast or videos or whatever and direct people to my book from there, where I don't need to get anyone's permission? Surely there are multiple paths here, why are you so bullish on writing short form media in particular?

There are indeed multiple paths, and I certainly can't stop you from trying them if you have other reasons to prefer them. But the reason you're somewhere near the end (I promise) of my incredibly long advice post is that you are (presumably) looking for the best advice that I am able to give, not just a menu of options. In my own experience, the best effort-reward ratio comes from doing some short form writing for media outlets.

Let's think about this in terms of who and how many people you need to persuade and how transparent it is to figure out where they are and what they're motivated by.

Being in someone else's media article, being asked to speak or guest somewhere, those are all ways of getting coverage that rely on impressing a small number of relatively hidden gatekeepers. They do have quite a high impact once you get in, but the challenge is figuring out how to do so, especially if you're aiming to get in on a consistent basis, which is generally a better approach to building a durable platform. Once you have a good network, being recommended and approached for things is great! But "just wait for people to approach you" isn't a good kind of advice to give, since there's nothing you can do about it directly — it's better to aim to do things that you have some level of control over, things that increase your visibility (which might in turn lead to people approaching you as well).

Creating your own thing is the ultimate in freedom in terms of what you create — you don't need to convince an editor that your topic is interesting, just an audience. But an audience is, hopefully, also a larger number of people than a few producers or editors, and figuring out who might be interested in your work and how to appeal to them is a long process. Once you've put in the work, having a substantial audience of your own is also very handy! But it's also a slow and not especially transparent set of steps (if you google "how to get more followers on social media", the advice is either pretty obvious, like post interesting things and engage with people, or incredibly scammy).

The set of steps that's the most transparent and at the same time exposes your work to a larger potential audience than you could reach by yourself? For my money, that's pitching short articles. Publications really do publish pitching guidelines and appropriate editor email addresses for writing short freelance articles in a way that they don't for PR-style pitching of interview media coverage, and you can control how many pitches you send out in a way that you can't control whether or not people approach you or even follow you.

I'm also particularly keen on suggesting pitching short pieces to other platforms because it's a lingcomm trajectory I don't see linguists following very much, whether because it seems mysterious and intimidating, because it's less obvious how to do it compared to posting on social media or saying yes if someone asks you for an interview, or because it's not as clear what the benefits are. There are general freelance writers who write pop language pieces, and some of them are even really good, but I also think that more people with a linguistics background could get in on this!

Again, if you're currently focusing on a different path and you're satisfied with how it's working for you, go ahead keeping on doing it! It's just that if you're not satisfied with how things are going for you in terms of lingcomm visibility, the highest impact strategy that I can advise is pitching short pieces, plural.

Okay, I'm sure this advice would probably be very effective if I had time to actually implement it, but I already have a job as a professor and this sounds like developing a whole nother job in media!

Yes, yes it is. It is in fact my job. And the jobs of a lot of other people. And while there are aspects of other people's jobs that a person from a related path can do as a casual sideline, it's hard to do the full thing (I've done some talks at universities and even co-authored a few papers as a non-academic, but I'm not suggesting someone should give me tenure for it). If you take nothing else away from this incredibly long post, let it be that when you're asking me how to make your prospective pop linguistics book do well, you're asking me how you can join my career, and that's a long answer. There is no secret easy "one quick trick" that makes a book do well — if there were, then everyone would do it and it would stop working. It's a gradual process of reputation building (what publishers call "platform"), and even then, there are no guarantees.

Here's another example: after the Crash Course Linguistics video series that I worked on came out, I was talking with a prof at a conference who said "those Crash Course videos are really great! I'd love it if you gave us some sort of talk on how I could make my class videos more like them!" And I had to say, "I mean, I'm glad you liked them, but you realize that it took a production team of about a dozen people, including professional animators and videographers, over a year to create them, right? I think it might be more efficient for you to convince your university that they need to hire some production help for you if they really want high quality video lectures, rather than you trying to cram more hours and skills into your workday." (Furthermore, my back-of-the-envelope calculation for how much these 16 videos cost to produce was well into the 6 figures.)

Many people who do more work than seems possible for one person actually have a team of people helping them out behind the scenes, whether it's a professor who manages to co-author so many papers through hiring student research assistants and postdocs and a lab manager, an author who has an editor and an agent and a publicist and an assistant, or anyone who has help with life admin tasks through a supportive partner, paying for house-cleaning or premade meals, or even getting a robot vacuum or a dishwasher. Hiring help isn't always feasible for everyone at every time, but studies suggest that paying someone else to take care of your most loathed tasks can be worth it, even if that means you spend the same amount of time working on a task you don't hate as much.

Another option might be forming a partnership or group with other people interested in lingcomm who have complementary skills and interests, or trading off your tedious admin tasks with a friend's long-procrastinated tasks that you don't have a built-up feeling of guilt over, which can be a good swap for both of you.

If you're someone who does already have one area that pays decent money and you're trying to branch out in the direction of more lingcomm, it's especially worth figuring out which things you're currently doing that you could delegate instead. (For example, when we started Lingthusiasm, even though it initially wasn't bringing in its own revenue, we hired people to help with audio editing and transcripts out of money we were earning from other sources, the same sources that meant that we didn't have time to do the production side of the podcast all by ourselves. But this is also why I'm suggesting writing, which takes less equipment, over audio/video, which takes more.)

Other ways that some academics manage to balance doing academic and public-facing work, including picking a specific niche (e.g. doing media interviews but not trying to maintain a written presence), somehow getting away with not doing as much admin (I don't know the internal politics of this, but I don't seem to see many active lingcommers who are also chairs of their departments), writing up their lingcomm process or the public's reaction to their lingcomm as research papers so they can still get academia points for it, getting grants or recognition for training students to do lingcomm, and probably more. But I'm not an academic, so I'd suggest talking to other academic lingcommers about this side!

In other cases, it may be more sustainable for profs to incorporate lingcomm as a course assignment, and encourage linguistics students into lingcomm careers like linguistics journalism and other kinds of media or communications jobs that can involve language. SciComm is a whole field and most of the people in it aren't professors! I've written a more comprehensive guide about what careers like mine can look like and my advice for other people who may be interested in entering them.

Well...you have an audience now! And I've written a book! Can I send you a copy?

I am broadly interested in books that are linguistics for a general audience, so any offer to send me a pop ling book needs to clearly articulate both a) how it is linguistics and b) how it is for a general audience.

That means that if you're writing a pop ling book and you don't have an obvious linguistics background (one or more degrees in linguistics), you need to explain to me how it is that your book still has adequate linguistics in it. Did you work with some linguists, that you can name, preferably who I've heard of? Did you cite some linguists, that you can name, preferably who aren't dead or retired? Do you know a linguist, who has read your book and can vouch for its linguistic content and can introduce you to me? (I really do know a lot of linguists, and many more linguists would have at least a mutual acquaintance or are affiliated with a conference or society that I've heard of.) Did you write a short form pop linguistics article quoting linguists and which made its way across my feeds with positive comments from linguists? (I really do try to pay attention to bylines on articles that do a good job at pop linguistics.) Is your book avoiding obvious red flags like language snobbery, fake etymologies, and other common myths? (If you don't know what the common myths are already, that's a sign that you need to do more consulting of linguists.)

That also means that if you're writing a pop ling book and you don't have an obvious track record of doing lingcomm, you need to explain to me how your book is suitable for a general audience. Being published by a trade (non-academic) press is a good signal. (That's why I recommend it above!) Or if you're published by the trade arm of an academic press, other signals that it’s for a general audience include: is this book priced for a general audience rather than academic pricing? (If your publisher doesn’t think your book stands a chance at being bought by people who aren’t employed at library purchasing departments, why should I?) And again, having done other things that demonstrate that you know what it looks like to actually write for a general audience and not just be an academic who thinks they're writing for a general audience (oh look it's our old friend "write some short form pieces first" again). By "general audience" I also mean "not just American" audience: I am not American, my podcast has a multinational team and international listenership, so books that lean hard on "the American story of X" as a pitch are...just not something I get excited about, even if other people may be interested.

I don’t choose whether or not to promote a book as a favour to the author or as a referendum on your personality (unless someone is like, actively hateful). I promote books as a service to readers, and if I want people to keep reading books on my recommendation, that means I need to only recommend books at certain levels of accuracy and approachability.

There are really not that many books per year that meet both of these criteria, and I would like to help there be a day when there are more, so yes, you can send my publisher an email (which they will forward to me) if you are midway through the process of writing a pop ling book that fits both of those criteria, especially if it's a first book and/or you belong to any of the many demographics that are still underrepresented in lingcomm. Keep in mind that more lead time is helpful and I make no guarantees about my own schedule, but if you've been following even a fraction of the advice above, the linguistics corner of the internet is very tiny, so it is highly likely that I will already know who you are :)

#linguistics #advice #weird internet careers #meta #lingcomm #linguistics jobs #books #publishing #pop linguistics

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lilaclovestowrite · 5 years

Text

Arcade Chaos (Katsuki x Cheerful!Reader)

“ Bakugo oneshot with cheerful!reader at arcade plz? ”

Type: Request from Quotev

Words: 2556

Fandom: My Hero Academia

Pairing: Katsuki x Reader

Genre: Hint of fluff, lots of Katsuki rage lol, and mainly humor

Summary: Somehow, you’re able to drag your crush, Katsuki Bakugou, to an arcade for the day. Of course, this creates chaos, since the Bakusquad happens to be there as well. But maybe, after all the chaos, you’ll finally be able to confess your true feelings to him!

Warnings:

None

💥💥💥

“Why the heck are we in this lame place!?” questioned an irritated Katsuki.

“Cuz arcades are fun!” I answered, leading him in by the hand. He was very resistant—but he was no match for my nonexistent strength.

“Fun? This place is for nerds who live in their mom’s basement. Just like stupid—”

“Deku, yeah, yeah,” I finished for him with a blasé attitude. “I’ve heard it all before. Why don’t you just focus on something else besides Midoriya?”

“Pfft, like what?”

“Uh, something that actually matters. Video games, obviously.”

“I’m leaving.” Just as he tried to escape, I pulled him back.

“Get yer hands off me!” He flicked his wrist away from me, and huffed as he scanned the arcade’s interior.

“Come on, please stay with me for just an hour? PLEEEEEAAAASSSEEEEEE~!?” I forcefully smiled, holding my hands together in a purposely pathetic pose.

“Well, you already kidnapped me so—whatever. And what’s the difference between these games and the ones on my phone? Only geeks play these chunky, 8-bit fossils.”

“Trust me. You’ll see,” I vaguely left as an answer.

After I dragged Katsuki around the building, I asked him if anything caught his eye. “So, do you know what game you wanna play?”

“’Nuke the Zombies’ didn’t look too trashy, I guess.”

I blinked once. “Uhh, how about something more child-friendly?”

“Fine. How about ’Blow up the Bunny’ then?”

Why did I ever think this was a good idea?

“Let’s not.”

But what we didn’t know, is that our other friends happened to be here as well! Eijiro, Denki, Hanta, and Mina approached us all at once.

“Wow! Hey, guys! Nice to see you here,” Eijiro greeted.

Hanta laughed. “Didn’t really expect to see you two here. . .specifically, together.”

“The heck you mean by that!?” Katsuki nearly erupted, but I held him back.

“Oh, y’know—just figured you’d be at home plotting your revenge for Midoriya or something.”

His response only earned him a snarl from Katsuki. But Mina, on the other hand, decided to push all of Katsuki’s buttons without thinking.

“Maybe they’re on a date!!” she gasped. “WAIT, ARE YOU—”

“SHUT YOUR MOUTH!! This isn’t a heckin’ date!” Katsuki debunked. “She bugged me nonstop about coming to this trash hole, and finally got on my nerves, so I came.”

By the smug look on my friend’s faces—they were obviously not buying it. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have minded it if were a date. Considering I’ve always had a thing for Katsuki. People may have thought I was crazy for liking someone so spastic with anger management issues—but there was more to him than just his atrocious personality. He had a lot of admirable qualities like uh, well, I’ll think of some later.

“Alright then~” Mina giggled.

“Guys, when can we play some games?” asked Denki.

“Right now!” Eijiro made an immediate beeline for Whac-A-Mole. “Bakugou, you gotta try out this game! I used to play it when I was younger, and it’s so much fun.”

“The heck is it?”

Katsuki stormed over and studied the attributes of the vintage game, while Eijiro explained the rules of it to him.

“And when the mole thing rises up, you just hit it with this mallet!”

“Pfft, sounds like a baby game. Pass.”

“Aw, c’mon!” I joined in, trying to convince him to try it out.

Hanta agreed, “Yeah! Don’t be such a wet blanket, man.”

After all our nagging, he eventually gave in and reluctantly picked up the game mallet. “Gross, a thousand brats probably got their diseased germs all over this thing.”

“They’re not as diseased as your attitude, that’s for sure—”

“COME AGAIN, KNOCK-OFF PIKACHU!?!”

“Hey, hey,” Eijiro tried calming. “Just try one round at least!”

“Ugh, fine.”

Once the game started, the plastic moles slowly rose up from their holes, and each one was hammered by Katsuki. He displayed his obvious boredom through stance and expression.

“This game is about as fun as watching paint dry.”

“Oh, it gets harder,” I snickered.

“This is about as hard as using Deku as a football.”

But he was soon showed otherwise—as the game’s difficulty increased. The moles now only stayed up for half a second now, and even Katsuki was having a hard time keeping up.

“C’mon, dude! Whack them!” Eijiro cheered.

“THIS STUPID MALLET ISN’T WORKING!!!” he screeched, causing the rest of the people around us to stare. It was a bit embarrassing. But that’s my penalty for going out in public with Katsuki. “DIE, RATS, DIEEEEEE!!!!” So, he dropped the mallet, and just started exploding the moles with his hands.

And of course, the result was he melted the arcade machine. All the moles were now nothing but liquefied plastic, which was totally uncalled for compared to the games standards.

I walked back to my friend’s table with Katsuki by my side.

“Alright, I just called Katsuki’s therapist and he was able to, er—scream out his issues. So, I think we’re good!” I informed with a thumbs up.

“My therapist can bite rocks.”

I let out a sigh of disappointment at his rude response.

“Hey, (Y/N)! Did you see any games that caught your eye?” Hanta wondered.

I answered with, “Hmm. . .well, I did wanna play Whac-A-Mole. But now it’s melted into the flooring, so. . .”

“It wasn’t even fun,” Katsuki downplayed. “I have more fun beating Deku. Wait—they should make a game called Whac-A-Deku. Now, I’d play that.”

We only stared at our friend, mildly disturbed.

Hanta said, “Pac-Man it is, then.”

After playing a few more games, we headed to the eating area. We ordered some pizza and soda, so we just chatted as we ate.

“You guys, what do you think is better? Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man?” asked Mina.

“They’re the same thing, Raccoon Eyes.”

“NO, PAC-MAN IS A MAN, AND MS. PAC-MAN IS A WOMAN.”

I awkwardly nibbled on my pizza, watching the conversation between them take a nosedive for the worst.

“Guys, is butter a carb?” Katsuki asked us.

Denki replied, “I don’t know—I don’t watch Gordon Ramsey.”

“Whatever, I’m getting cheese fries.” He launched his pizza in the trash can (which he carelessly missed), and headed back to the ordering station.

Just as Katsuki got out of earshot, Mina immediately began interrogating me.

“So. . .ya sure you two weren’t on a date~?”

I went red with total shock and embarrassment. “What? No way! He doesn’t like me like that.”

Hanta chuckled. “He liked you enough for you to literally drag him here. That’s like, a deathwish for most people.”

I knew he had a point.

Eijiro said, “Plus, he needs a girlfriend. He needs someone to keep him fairly sane.”

All their talking had me blushing. Yes, I liked Katsuki a lot—but I never thought it’d go any further than that. However, you never know about these kind of things.

“So. . .should I ask him out or something?” I hesitantly questioned.

“Go ahead! I mean, there’s not a line of girls trying to date him, that’s for sure.”

I took it into consideration. Maybe today, I should try to make a move. I mean, YOLO, amirite?

“Alright, I’ll try next time I see him,” I gulped.

They all smiled uncontrollably, but instinctively stopped once Katsuki returned to the table.

“Why’re you idiots all staring at me like a bunch of idiots?”

“Oh, uh—well. . .” I mentally prepared myself for rejection. I knew all my friends were bursting at the seams, waiting for me to confess my feelings to Katsuki. But it was just so awkward. So, I chickened out. “I uh, wanted to know if you were gonna share your cheese fries with me.”

“What does share mean?”

I could hear Eijiro facepalm. So, I ended the awkwardness with, “Nothing! Just eat your fries—”

Later, we all continued searching for what else to play.

So, I cleared my throat to get everyone’s attention. “Ahem. How about we do something that’s multiplayer?”

“You mean like a competition?” Katsuki wondered, a psychotic smile forming on his face once the idea of winning first place entered his mind. Now, we were all scared.

“Uh, you’re smiling like a psycho again—I MEAN, uh, yeah! We just need to find a game that allows two players. . .and one that isn’t taken.” As I examined the room and every one of its consoles, I found one that caught my eye.

Dance Dance Revolution (DDR).

“Hmm, I know! That one!” I excitedly pointed to the one I was referring to.

“OMG, that one is so cool! I used to play it when I was younger!” Mina beamed.

“Oh, great. Dancing? I thought you’d pick something that would actually hold my interest. Like no-scoping zombies or something.”

I crossed my arms and said the thing I knew would make him do what I wanted. “What? You think you can’t beat me? Think I’m gonna win instead~?”

“Pfft, in your dreams. I’d beat you at any game at any time of the week. You’re a lame gamer.”

“You think so, eh? Well, let’s just find out!” I skipped over to the DDR machine and patiently waited for the two children to finish up their round. However, patience wasn’t an idea Katsuki could process in his arrogant brain.

“Hit the road, punks! I’ve got a game to win!” He shoved the two kids off, and cleared the platforms for both of us. I tried mouthing an apology to the two schoolboys, but they had already escaped to find their parents.

Katsuki extended his arms and stretched out his fingers. Eijiro and Hanta approached me, asking if I was sure this was a good idea. I knew Katsuki was unhealthily obsessed with winning, but that only made it more fun being his opponent, at least in my opinion! (Plus, seeing him fail was ten-times funnier).

“Go easy on her, dude,” Denki tried helping out.

“No way, Calamari. I’m not a braindead loser like you.” Finishing up his mini exercise, he stepped onto the dance platform. “What’re you waiting for, girly?” Katsuki snarked at me with a confident smirk.

I stepped on mine as well, and scrolled through the list of songs to perform. “We could start with easy mode,” I offered.

“No way. Go for the hardest mode you can find.”

Someone was going to break their legs, and it wasn’t going to be Midoriya this time around.

“Oh. . .well, uh—alright!” I landed my finger on this Vocaloid song called The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku, which was apparently the most challenging one on this menu. “Alright, there’s the modes: Beginner, Intermediate, Pro, Master, and uh, Death.”

“Choose Death then.”

With a cloud of anxiousness looming over my figure, I pressed that option. I didn’t know what to expect—but I was scared.

“How bad can it be?” chuckled Eijiro.

Oh, but it was pain. It was the most torture I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.

When the gameplay started, it wasn’t too hard in the intro of the song. But when the fast part came, it was like we were dancing to save our lives. People in the building came to spectate us and our anguish—but our friends cheered us on the entire time.

“REEEEEEEEE, END MEEEEEEEEEE!!!” Katsuki screeched as he barely managed to touch the flashing tiles on his platform.

I felt as if I was jumping across a room full of nails sticking straight up. I could barely keep up with the beat of the song, and I was already exhausted. But we weren’t even halfway into it.

“BEATING ALL FOR ONE IS EASIER THAN THIS TORTURE MACHINE!” roared Katsuki.

“You’re almost to the beat break!” Hanta reassured.

Finally, the first verse of the song ended. So, our legs could take a break for a few seconds. Katsuki and I were desperately trying to regain oxygen, since it was such a rush. When we looked at our current scores—I saw that I was luckily five points higher than Katsuki.

“WHAT THE HECK!? HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE!?” he raged.

“HA.”

Everyone cheered for me at the moment, but Katsuki wasn’t having it. He was more than determined to beat me now.

When the gameplay resumed, we continued to push ourselves to dance on the correct tiles. Our scores were nearing closer together, and it was only a matter of time before one of us passed each other for good and won.

“ALMOST THERE,” Katsuki spoke to himself, as he glimpsed at his own score.

But just the moment before it was all over, Denki accidentally activated his Quirk due to the hype building up in his system—and it shot out at the DDR machine, causing it to short-circuit and die.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” Katsuki bellowed out, as he fell on his knees and placed his hands on the now black screen. “I’M GONNA KILL YOU, STUPID PIKACHU!!!”

However, it was pointless because Denki already fried his brain and went dumb. “Wheyyyy~”

Eijiro couldn’t help but laugh hysterically, along with Hanta and Mina. It only made Katsuki’s blood boil—and frankly, I couldn’t help but giggle too.

“I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS PAIN.” Katsuki stood up and stalked out of the arcade. Of course, I followed him.

“Katsuki! Don’t be upset. It’s only a game.”

“I WAS SO CLOSE TO WINNING!” he fumed. “I COULD HAVE BROKEN THE STUPID RECORD—”

“Shh, just relax! They’ll probably fix it, and we can always come back later.” I placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, which he surprisingly didn’t flick off.

“Hmph. I’m never playing that demon game ever again.”

I laughed softly. “Well, there’s plenty of other games. But other than the fact Denki shut off the game—did you have fun?”

He turned his head to me, and for I moment, I swear I saw his eyes soften by a fraction. “Maybe a little—but not that much.”

I’ll take that as a yes, coming from him.

But now that we were together with no other distractions, I decided to take a risk and slide my hand into his. He widened his eyes—since affection was probably a concept far removed from his unfriendly mentality.

I looked down at the floor and smiled, saying, “I was thinking, Katsuki. Would you uh, would you consider being my Player Two?”

I didn’t even care how cheesy I was being at this point.

“The heck does that mean?”

Our friends screamed from a distance, “SHE’S ASKING YOU OUT, GENIUS!”

Katsuki stiffened up, since he was struggling to find a riposte to throw back in my face. But it was relentless. Instead, he let out a sigh and told me, “That’s the sappiest and most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard—but sure. You’re not as annoying as the others.”

I strained my cheeks from smiling so much, and I threw my arms gleefully around Katsuki. The others were probably afraid he’d blow up or something, but thankfully, he didn’t. Instead, he returned the favor by awkwardly rubbing my head.

“They’re so cute together~” sighed Mina.

“Yeah, Bakugou better not screw it up,” Eijiro added with a smile.

“It’s Bakugou, he screws everything up.”

“True.”

Maybe coming to this place was a good idea after all~

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kitkatd7 · 4 years

Note

Hi, could I get a ship for Marvel and HP? I have brown hair and eyes. I'm majoring in either Criminal Justice or Political Science since I'm interested in both. I love reading (mostly sci-fi and fantasy), playing RPG games, and playing board games. I'm a quiet person, but caring and sarcastic when you get to know me. I'm smart, optimistic, determined, ambitious, and logical. I'm stubborn, sometimes bossy, and a perfectionist. I'm a INTJ and Neutral Good. I'd prefer male ships, but open to any!

I hope you like it! I’m a little rusty so I’m sorry in advance

Marvel ship: I ship you with…

Loki Laufeyson!!!

You both shared a love of literature (even though from different genres) and you often read to each other, sharing ideas and opinions on just about every aspect of the books

At first, they were simple discussions with surface-level reading but over time you dug deeper into the books-

And your relationship

He loved how passionate you were about things that were important to you

And your ambition and wit left him dumbfounded on more than one occasion

Loki, even the one with a sarcastic comment, was completely shocked the first time you snarked back

Which in turn led to a constant banter between you two

He usually won these sass battles by whispering something not entirely innocent into your ear

You're both quite competitive so game nights often lead to higher scale challenges

Prank wars are frequently the result of this

Once- although it be childish- you put emerald green dye in his shampoo, claiming it was stylish and matched his outfits

In turn he made a shambles of your usually perfect school binders and study books, knowing how you liked them in order

You demanded he fix it, threatening that he would wake up naked on top of Stark tower if he didn't

That seemed to do it and you were both back at your tricks in no time

Your relationship also had a sweet side

Lazy, early mornings lounging in bed we're not uncommon

Soft, passionate kisses often planted between whispered words and sweet nothings

Who would have thought you'd fall in love with the God of Mischief?

Harry Potter ship: I ship you with…

Sirius Black!

You run around together, causing trouble and raising hell all over the school grounds

Wether that be teasing James and Lily or annoying Remus

Or flying around the school after curfew in his motorcycle

Playing quidatch when you weren’t even on the team

Professor Mcgonagall definitely didn’t appreciate that and you both lost several house points

But it was worth it

Despite all the mischief you cause, you both do rather good in school

You spend hours bent over books together, helping him with charms and he helps you with transfiguration

Your both overly competitive in anything and everything

You come up with the most ridiculous competitions and dares

Including who could stand on a flying broom the longest

Neither of you really won that as you had to save Sirius from plummeting to his death

But he would never admit he needed saving

Often he’s begging you to take your head out of a book and go to Hogsmeade with him

Just for the sake of bothering him you go to great lengths to make him wait for you to get ready to leave

Which often ends with him promptly throwing you over his shoulder and walking out of the dorms with you laughing hysterically, still over his shoulder as students and professors alike stare at you in absolute confusion

By the fifth or sixth time this happens almost everyone has exepted it as normal and they ignore your obsurd charades

Your both thourougly trained in the art of sarcasm and banter, constantly snarking at each other until your friends get sick of it

Once Remus had had enough of your attitudes together and promptly preforming “Silencio” so that you would bloody shut up

But you got him back afterwards by making his bed fly and he had to chase it around the grounds with Mcgonagall yelling at him to stop fooling around

#ships #requests #kits ships #harry potter ships #marvel ships #sirius black #loki #loki laufeyson #kits requests #loki ships #sirius ships

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nctloveclub · 5 years

Text

ghost

pairing: nakamoto yuta x reader

prompt: based off ghost by halsey | badboy!au

genre: angst angst angst

words: 1.4k

a/n: ngl i was kinda struggling with this lol,, but i hope it was angsty enough for u hehe. feedback is appreciated!!

looking back at your relationship with yuta, maybe it was destined to end.

yuta was your stereotypical bad boy who wore leather jackets and rode a motorcycle. there was something about him that lure people in. maybe it be his attitude and snark remarks, or was it the mysterious aura he gave. he always had a different girl on his arm, leading to girls constantly crying over over the boy.

come to think of it, were you any different? you were one of the exceptions, you had actually dated yuta. the relationship was short lasted, only being 3 months, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t just as full of emotion.

yuta had approached you first. you had just left the library and it was late at night. yuta had offered you a ride home and though you were hesitant, you agreed. it was better than walking home in the middle of the night. he handed you the motorcycle helmet and told you to hold onto him. you obliged, wrapping your arms tightly around his middle.

he had asked for your number that night and asked you out the next day.

the early stages of the relationship was full of sneaking away and quick make-out sessions in random corridors. there was something intimate about the short times you spent with yuta. in private he was a different person. he wasn’t the bad boy everyone knew him to be.

he was a boy with sad eyes. a boy who wished to love and be loved.

he was quick to tell you little white lies, though it was just words of endearment to you at the time. these words were always exchanged during your little make-out sessions. but they ended just as quick as they started.

yuta had dragged you away from another study session, dragging you towards the back of the library. his lips were quick to meet yours, you gasping in surprise. you melted into the kiss, your arms wrapping around yuta’s neck. yuta pulls away first, resting his forehead against yours. “you’re so cute.” he coos at you.

you feel yourself blush at his words, which puts a grin on yuta’s face. “when are you free yuta? i wanna spend time with you.” you whine. yuta sighs, “i’m sorry i’m so busy. but can you come over this weekend? we can spend the night together.” he smirks and you smile at him, nodding your head. he gives you one more peck before saying ‘goodbye’ and leaving.

that weekend was the first time the two of you slept together. the night was full of cuddling and whispered sweet nothings. yuta was very loving, taking the time to appreciate every part of you. being with yuta felt like you were in a dream, just full of love and passion.

as the relationship went on, you noticed how the emotion and passion of the relationship was diminishing.

you noticed how you would have to beg for yuta’s attention and that he never had the time of day for you. he would always put off dates and when you were together, the two of you would just sleep together. this situation was the catalyst for many fights.

“why do you never want to spend time with me yuta?” you ask. you sat next to yuta on your bed, the said boy laying next to you. “not again y/n.” he groans. you roll your eyes at his response. “i don’t even ask for much yuta. i just want to see you.” you reply, looking at the sleepy boy. “i know but i’m busy.” he replies.

“you always say that! what’s so important that you don’t even spend time with your girlfriend anymore?” yuta sits up from his position, moving to put on his clothes and not even giving you a response. “does this relationship mean anything to you yuta?” you ask.

“of course it does.” he replies, pausing his actions to look at you. his hand moved to land on top of yours but you move it away. “are you sure? because it sure seems like it doesn’t.” you say with sad eyes, your voice just merely above a whisper.

he doesn't reply. "what happened to you? you used to be so different." you whisper. yuta gets up and puts on the rest of his clothes, walking towards the door of your room. "well if i'm so different than before why are you still with me? i'm not good for you." he says before walking out of your room.

you hear your front door open and close and you let out a small scream of frustration. in your blind anger, your first thoughts that come to mind are "i hate you yuta nakamoto." and it's the first time you soon realize you take refuge in his absence.

a week passes and you find yuta on your doorstep, a boquet of flowers in his hand. "i'm sorry." is all he says. you don't respond. "i'm sorry for my absence. i know you just want to see me. i'm sorry for not being there and not spending time with you."

you take the bouquet from his hand before giving him a smile. "i forgive you. but you're on thin ice." you playfully glare at him and yuta lets out a laugh. the two of you spend the rest of the day together and you treasure it. you got to see yuta that you knew, the one you developed feelings for.

yuta kept his end of his promise for the next month, and soon enough you noticed the same changes. your relationship felt one sided. you tried so hard to keep the spark alive but it was useless. yuta just wasn't emotionally invested as you were.

you noticed how you only saw him when he was feeling lonely and horny. the sex wasn't like it was in the beginning. it was just full of trivial words and sweet nothings.

yuta lies beside you, his face facing yours. "i love you y/n." he murmurs, his hand cupping your cheek. "i love you too." you reply. you did love yuta but you knew deep down that the relationship wouldn't last. you knew that eventually you would leave him.

soon enough, you had enough. you noticed how more absent yuta was and how he would get more text messages from other girls. you would confront him about it but he would just say they were nothing and that he doesn't even respond to them.

yuta had came over and was quick to bring you into a kiss. you savored the feeling, knowing that it would be the last. you pulled away first, yuta giving you a look of confusion at your sad expression. "what's wrong?" he asks.

"i can't keep doing this." you answer, your voice weak. "what do you mean?" he asks, taking your hands in his. "yuta don't play dumb. we both know that this relationship isn't working."

he gives you a sad look. "y/n it is working. i love you so much." he replies, going to cup your cheek but you move away from his grasp. "yuta it isn't. you think i don't notice but i do. you're not emotionally invested like i am. you're not like the yuta i know."

yuta is quiet once more, he notices the tears forming in your eyes and he feels his heart break. his heart breaks because he knows you're right. he knows that this relationship was one sided and that it was destined to end. "i deserve better than this yuta. i'm sorry but i can't do this. the spark isn't there anymore." you say quietly, wiping the fallen tears.

"so this is it?" he asks, letting out a breath he didn't know he was holding. you nodded your head and he felt nauseous and that he would collapse at any second. "i'm sorry y/n. truly. for everything." he says, moving to press one last kiss to your forehead. "goodbye y/n." he murmurs against your skin. you could feel yourself start to break down at his words.

you watch as yuta walks out of your door and out of your life. you walk to your bedroom and lie down, letting the tears fall. you finally break down into sobs and you cry yourself to sleep.

you knew you did the right thing and that it was for the best. you learn from your relationship with yuta that not everything works out. you learned to find someone who's just as invested as you are because it was what you deserved. someone who loved you just as you loved yuta.

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kpopisthereasonihavenolife · 6 years

Text

Brave Enough

Monsta X

Lee Jooheon/Reader [F]

Genre: Fluff

Words: 3.5k

Why is it that everything I write for my angle Jooheon I don’t like? Like the last 3 things I’ve written for him I’m so unhappy with, and I don’t know why????

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It was a surprise seeing Jackson just meandering around on the streets while Jooheon had taken a break from working in his studio for a bit of fresh air. Let alone, to see that Jackson was walking around with a woman he’s never seen before. Jooheon, shouting across the way to his friend he hadn’t seen in a while, watched as he turned to the sound of his name and screamed at Jooheon.

They hadn't seen each other outside of promotions in quite some time, so it was nice to bump into each other. Jooheon watched as Jackson shook your shoulders as you swatted at him and told him to go to Jooheon and say hello, and soon enough he was. Taking your wrist and dragging you along behind him.

When the three of you all gathered in a spot, out of the way of other pass bys, Jackson and Jooheon had a moment of hugging before they were greeting each other. Talking for a moment as Jooheon then peered over Jackson’s broad shoulder at you.

“Who’s your friend? On a date or something?” He watched as you covered your mouth and faked a gag, making him laugh and Jackson gasp at you. You looked at him, a look of fake disgust on your face.

“I’d rather eat wads of paper than go on a date with him.” Jackson shoved at your shoulder, making you crack a grin.

“I’m not that horrible! You’re the horrible one here.”

“So, no date?” Jooheon piped up.

“No date,” you said looking at Jackson. “Ever,” you quickly added on. Jackson just gave you a look as you shrugged at him. “What? I’ve literally told you over and over, you are so not my type.” He shoved you again as you just laughed at him as you then turned towards Jooheon. “I’m Y/N by the way, an old friend of our mutual friend.” You motioned to Jackson with your head.

“Lee Jooheon. Good to see a new face, it was getting old seeing the same ones over and over.” Jackson, now seeing the introductions were finished initiated conversation again.

“What’re you doing? Busy with schedules lately?” Jooheon shook his head.

“Just working in the studios a bit. Schedules are finished, at least for a little while.”

“You should come with us to hang out then! We were on our way to the bowling alley.” Jooheon was ready to refuse, not wanting to intrude on the two of you, when you added in.

“It’d be no problem. Yugyeom is picking up one of his friends and meeting us there too. Bringing one more wouldn’t hurt.” With a bit more convincing, Jooheon was eventually persuaded into heading off with the two of you, Jackson catching up and you getting to know him. When the three of you arrived, Yugyeom was waiting outside the bowling alleys doors with a fellow ‘97 liner friend of his, Jungkook as he sprung off the bench he sat on to run to greet you guys.

He gave you a hug and greeted Jackson as well as Jooheon, happy to see another familiar face to join the fun. Jungkook following and greeting everyone, knowing you quite well through Yugyeom. You always wondered how someone like you, a simple working woman with a boring job stocking and restocking shelves in a convenience store, had managed to befriend people of higher social status. But, who knows and who cares at this point.

When the 5 of you got into your designated bowling lanes, the issue of teams occurred; with 5 people, it would be uneven. Jackson had cracked that he and Jooheon be on your team, not only because they came all the way here with you, but also because you weren’t the best at bowling. No matter how many times you came here with the guys, you never seemed to get better, and Jackson never let you live it down.

After some harmless banter, and a slap on Jackson’s back from you that was just a bit too hard, the teams were split. You had decided to steal Jungkook, not wanting to have Jackson for once, as he was always on your team and keep Jooheon, since he was your new friend. You called dibs on him.

Yugyeom, a bit salty you stole his friend, and Jackson, very salty you chose Jungkook and not him, your best friend, both allied together and pledged to cream you at the games to come. And thus, the games begun.

As you were already aware, you weren’t the best at bowling, but Jooheon and Jungkook had your back. When the other two pledged to wreck your, already in shambles, honor, your boys pledged to restore it to it’s shining, bright glory.

And restore it they did.

You walked out of the bowling alley after playing 3 different games, and taking small breaks to munch away on food and stop to take a bathroom break or two. Jackson and Yugyeom won only 1 game out of the three, the first one. Jooheon and Jungkook claimed to let them win the first one to get their hopes up and then the last 2 they dominated, letting you walk out with your head held high that you were once again on top of them.

After bowling, the 5 of you stopped by a small diner to grab something before you all headed back to where you were before. Jooheon had to make a stop by the studio he left earlier on, making sure to grab anything he left behind and Jackson would be going back home. Jungkook would be walked back to his dorm by Yugyeom as he then would go back to his dorm. You were heading to the store before you headed home.

“Hey, the store near your apartment is close to Jooheon’s studio, isn’t it?” Yugyeom piped up from your right side, earning Jooheon’s attention who sat at your left.

“Depends, I kinda need to know the location of his studio.” Jooheon gave you the address of his studio building and after thinking on it, you hesitantly nodded. Jungkook and Yugyeom smiled at each other, as if they were silently having a small conversation as Yugyeom then nudged you with his elbow.

“Why not walk with Jooheon to the store? You two just met, yeah? Get to know each other more.” Jackson gasped from across the table, catching on to what Yugyeom was trying to set up and smiled as he smacked the table.

“You totally should take her! I mean, it’s getting late and no woman should be going out this late on her own. Especially someone as cute as my best girl, you know what I’m saying?” You scoffed as you rolled your eyes.

“Flattery won’t earn any compliments from me, sorry Wang.” You stated coldly as you smirked and raised your brow with attitude, right before taking a sassy sip of your drink.

“You know, you wound me.”

“I’m so grief stricken.” You set your cup down before looking at Jooheon. “But, if you wouldn’t mind the company. If we’re going the same way anyways, might as well go together instead of me creepily following you like some stalker.” Jooheon easily agreed. Even without all the banter of it, he would’ve probably walked you anyways.

Soon, everyone was on their own ways, Jackson and Yugyeom smiling at you and Jooheon as you walked away, Jungkook giving you one last pat on the back, leaving both you and Jooheon to look at each other confused. But, nonetheless, you were off.

He ended up going to the store with you, and even walking with you inside. When you insisted he could go, he out right refused, waiting for you to get your needed things, check out and then walked you back to your apartment building. It wasn’t too far from his dorm actually, which was pleasant for him to find out. Before you managed to leave, he was able to snag your phone number from you, as you got his and then you two departed.

When he got back to the dorms, he was greeted by a few members out in the living room as he opened his phone, going to your newly added contact and texting you that he made it back safely. He was strictly told by you to text when he got back. You texted not 3 minutes later with a ‘good, you remembered.’ From there, it was a full blown conversation.

You two met often. You’d text and call when you had free time and were even convinced by Jooheon to come to the dorms and met the rest of his team, who had been eager to meet you as well. Jooheon talked about you often, or if he was randomly smiling at his phone screen, they all assumed it was because he was talking to you.

He was doing a piss poor job at hiding the crush he had on you. He might as well have had a giant neon sign pointing to his head that he likes you. Yet you remained completely oblivious of this fact, as you were too busy with snarking at Jackson, as he would text you about how things were going with Jooheon.

He called you out on it the second time you told him you were hanging out with Jooheon. He had blatantly stated you liked Jooheon from the get go, and you hated when he was right, so you just changed topics or hung up on him if he was calling you when he talked about it. Which was more often than you cared to admit.

Jooheon was a sweet soul, kind and hardworking. Busy all the time, stressed a lot from working and writing songs. When they were ready for a comeback, everyone got busy and got more stressed from promotions and featured stage performances. So, you made it a point to pop by every now and again to backstage areas and make sure the boys were eating right and would even offer massages to those who looked tense to try and get them to relax.

Jooheon was, of course, the number 1 candidate. But soon, you started to feel like maybe you were around him too much. Of course, you knew you liked him, and you knew that because you liked him your mind automatically drew yourself towards him. You searched for him first and immediately went to him when you found him. He was your first thought and your last. You thought you might be overdoing it, so you started to limit yourself.

You’d go to other members first, or chat with someone on the staff. If they were backstage with another group you knew, GOT7 for example, you’d stop there before you were ushered over by Jackson or Yugyeom, who 100% knew everything.

And Jooheon noticed. He noticed and he felt like something was off. He noticed how you use to come to him first, see him first, smile to him first and now you were always looking away from him until you had to, or if he caught you in time. It made him uneasy. So, one day he caught you and told you he wanted to go out with you on the next day he had a little free time between promotions and traveling.

The time wouldn’t be very long, 5 hours if you were lucky, but he wanted to see if he could worm out that distance that had created itself and make sure everything would be okay. And maybe, just maybe if he was brave enough, he’d tell you how he felt. That being a big maybe.

So, 4 days later he was texting you at 3 PM asking if you could get out with him for a while, in which you told him you’d met him after your work shift ended at 3:15. He sprinted to your store in which he saw you stocking the final shelve of canned goods, rotating labels and making sure nothing was dented when he came over to you and hugged you.

“I’m nearly done. Just wait a few minutes longer, yeah? Then I’ll head back, change out of these,” you gestured to your uniform, “and I’m all yours.” He almost blushed at your choice of words. If only you could be his. Then, like you said, not 10 minutes late you were walking out of the store with him.

The two of you walked around, stopped to get something to drink and rest before you walked around some more. Just window shopping. You stopped in a small store, selling this and that, little bits of anything just to browse around. You were looking at a shelf not far from Jooheon as a working, middle aged woman approached him, tapping his shoulder. Tearing his attention away from you he looked at her.

“Got yourself a girlfriend?” Jooheon flushed at her statement.

“N-no! Just, well not yet? I wanna ask her, but I’m too much of a wuss. I hate rejections.” He rubbed the back of his neck as he huffed and the woman motioned over to a shelf of fake, weaved flower crowns. He looked at you once before disappearing behind the shelf and looking at them. They were beautiful for being fake flowers. Some in all white, some with different colored flowers, some with roses, others with ones that almost resembles honeysuckles. Even some that were completely black if that was their taste.

“Why not try with one of these? Their not cliche like jewelry and they’ll stand out too.” The woman peeked around the shelf, looking at you before she looked back and plucked a crown that had small, white flower buds all across it. “I think this one would look best on her, wouldn’t you think?” Jooheon didn’t know if he was just being scammed into buying a flower crown or if he was getting legitimate help, but nonetheless, the idea seemed tempting to him.

If he did it in a unique way, maybe things would go better than he thought. He took the flower crown from the woman, looking at it before thinking about it sitting on your head. He smiled as he nodded to her, she taking it back before quietly ringing it up and Jooheon paying for it. Se had put it into a small box then stuffed it into a small bag before giving it to Jooheon, who was watching you come back to him.

You walked up to his side, wanted to peek inside the bag as he held it closed and to his side now.

“You buy something?”

“Obviously.”

“Let me see!”

“You will, just be patient.” You huffed, pouting as he just laughed at you, poking at your puffed out cheek. He turned to the woman behind the counter, thanking her as the two of you walked out. Jooheon checked his phone for the time, he was running out of it. He could only stay with you for another 40 minutes, and that was pushing it.

The two of you sat at a pretty empty place at a close by park, not knowing where else to go for such a short amount of time left. You two sat on a bench, his bag next to him.

“You gonna show me what you bought or not, Mr. Secretive.” He looked down at the small back in his hand as he huffed. Now or never.

“Alright, but you gotta close your eyes. It’s a present.”

“A present? What’s the occasion.” He just put his hand over your eyes, making you laugh as you closed your eyes. He felt your lids close and took his hand away, taking the box out of the bag. He opened it and moved the crown from the padding it in, to then place it on you. You furrowed your brow, not knowing what was on your head.

Jooheon moved his hands from the top of your head to the sides of it before he leaned closer to you and put a small kiss on the corner of your mouth. Your eyes shot open, not expecting it and covered your mouth, cheeks flushed. Jooheon just smiled at your reddened cheeks before he pulled out his phone and took a picture of your frozen in shock state.

Cheeks flushed, hands covering your mouth and a flower crown on top of your head. He quickly snapped it before he showed you. He brought your hands down a bit, leaning in to see the picture. The flower crown was beautiful. You looked from his phone to him, seeing the smile that never left his face.

“Jooheon?”

“The occasion is that I like you. This is my confession.” Your face grew warmer as Jooheon gushed and poked at your cheeks, as you just shied away from him. Whether or not you rejected him didn’t matter to him for some reason. Just seeing you so shy, as opposed to your normal loud and rowdy self, was mind blowing for him.

“You suck,” you mumbled to him.

“Oh, and why is that?”

“Because you’re cheesy and the flower crown is cute and you’re cute and it’s not fair because now I’m all embarrassed and now I wanna spend my life with you, but I can’t even spend the next hour with you.” You puffed your cheeks, confessing how you felt as Jooheon just laughed and flopped his body over so that his head was now on your lap.

You looked down to him, thinking maybe your redness should be disappearing anytime now, the initial shock of it growing weaker as the words had already left both of your mouths. He looked up to you, smiling as he poked your nose with his finger.

“I’m sorry I can’t spend much more time with you. I wish I could Princess.” You cocked your brow at him.

“Princess? Where’d that come from?”

“Well, I figured since you’re going to be mine now, and you’re wearing a crown. It seemed fitting, you know?”

“Oh, I’m going to be yours now am I? What, no official cheesy “will you be my girlfriend” speech?” He rolled his eyes at you.

“I mean, I can whip something up if you’d like me to.”

“Yeah, honestly let’s just skip the formalities. Be my boyfriend idiot.”

“So demanding.”

“Royalty has a tendency to be.” You smiled as you referred to him calling you princess not 20 seconds ago. He laughed at you as he leaned up and put another kiss on you, only this time on your lips and now on the corner of them. He pulled back and watched your face burn, once again getting that brilliant red tint on your cheeks.

“Are you going to be this cute every time I kiss you?”

“Oh shut up.” You turned away as he lay back down and shifted to nuzzle his face into your stomach, wrapping his arms around your waist. He felt your hands thread through his hair as he relaxed into your touch. “You know you have to get going soon, right?” He groaned. He suddenly didn’t want to leave you more than he did before.

“Can’t you just come back to the dorm with me? I’m sure the guys won’t mind.” You laughed at him.

“No way. I have work in the morning and you have work early in the morning. Now time to unlatch,” you tapped his head, making him flinch, “and scurry on home.” He begrudgingly lifted himself from your lap as he sat and pouted at you. You pulled at his cheek as he whined.

You kissed the cheek you pinched as you smiled to him again.

“You’ll come to any event I invite you to, right?” He asked you.

“I go to events anyways to make sure you guys are taking take of yourselves.”

“Yeah, but now you’ll come because you want to see your cute boyfriend, and not the other guys right?”

“Is that a bit of possessiveness I hear, Lee Jooheon?”

“It might be.”

“Yes,” you chuckled out to him. “I’ll go and attend any event you invite me to. That is, if I can get time off work. I still need to make a living you know.” He rolled his eyes as he got up and ended up walking you home. He was still annoyed he had to leave, especially now that he finally got you to actually agree to be his girlfriend. He stood with you for a couple minutes, just holding your hand outside your building doors.

It took a couple promises to visit him as soon as possible, as well as many promised text and phone calls from the future from you before he managed to let you go and trot inside your building and up into your apartment. You had just slipped off your shoes and moved to your room to change when your phone was ringing with a facetime call.

You rolled your eyes as you picked up the call, flipping on the light as you smiled into the camera.

“What in the world is wrong with you,” you laughed.

“I just couldn’t wait to see you again.”

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meeedeee · 7 years

Text

Writers, Entitlement, Snark – Oh, My! RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As busy as I am right now, I can’t seem to move past this article about Dan Thomson, a 68-year-old man who recently filed a complaint against the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, claiming they rejected his application on the basis of age discrimination. The workshop’s current director, Lan Samantha Chang, who has been in the job for over a decade, says that the selection process is based entirely on talent: though other details about the candidates are sent to the graduate school, her policy is “not to look at them and to evaluate candidates solely on the writing sample.”

To be clear at the outset: age discrimination certainly exists in the world, and is just as certainly a problem. I will, however, lay real cash-money that age is not the reason Thomson was rejected, and would have done so even before reading the blurb and first two chapters of his self-published opus on Goodreads. (And oh, goddamn, are we returning to that subject later.)

“It seems like a program just for millennials,” says Thomson. “I would have guessed there’d be a broader range of ages.” As the article points out, the program is held at a graduate school, where the main demographic is people in their twenties: just under half of those accepted since 2013 have been aged between 18 and 25, while the median age for accepted applicants is 34 and a half. The median age of all applicants, however, is only 36 – hardly a difference suggestive of bias.

Thomson, he says, isn’t interested in seeing the program reprimanded: he just wants to get in: “I wanted to make clear that somebody my age has a right to do it.”

To paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this must be some strange usage of the word right that I wasn’t previously aware of. While it’s certainly Thomson’s right to apply to the workshop, it is not his right to be accepted. There are only 25 spots available to the thousand-odd yearly applicants: with that sort of ratio in play, even genuine talents will inevitably miss out, not because they’re bad writers, but because there simply isn’t space for everyone.

And then we get to the kicker:

Thomson said he enjoyed his creative writing classes in college in the early 1970s, but found at the time he lacked the perspective on life to offer more than surface finery in his prose.

“It’s not prejudice against young people to say, ‘You don’t have a lot of experience,’ ” he said.

After graduate school in anthropology and law school, Thomson focused on raising his family and living a life worth writing about. Two years ago, he completed his first novel-length work, “The Candidate,” and decided to self-publish it.

He has not sought other options for publication, nor has he applied to other creative writing programs…

“It may be vanity on my part… but I have a fairly high opinion of the two pieces that I sent in,” he said.

Again, for the sake of clarity: I have nothing against self-publishing as an endeavour. I know some amazing writers who’ve opted to take that route, and have fallen in love with many an indie book as a consequence, to say nothing of self-pubbed-gone-mainstream works like Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Nor do I have any bias against writers who start their careers later in life: one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read, The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, was the first and only work of Mary Ann Shaffer, published posthumously after her death at age 74. There are plenty of great writers who never got their start until later in life, or who found success through non-traditional means, or who managed both: because, by themselves, these facts are not cause for any degree of scepticism.

But for fuck’s sake.

Among authors of any kind, a near-universal pet peeve is being told, on revealing their career, “Oh, I’d love to write a book some day!” by someone who admits to not writing now. It’s not that we have any bone-deep aversion to the idea of writing for fun as opposed to writing for money; indeed, a great many of us swim in both waters at once, or else migrated from one camp to the other without quite noticing how it happened. The objection, rather, is to those who reflexively conflate the two – “Oh, you do this as a job? I’d love that as a hobby!” – without realising how arrogantly dismissive this sounds. At best, they’re assuming that writing involves no element of craft or skill that requires refinement over time, no awareness of an ever-fluctuating market and industry, and so can be picked up by anyone at the drop of a hat. At worst, they’re boasting of their own brilliance-to-be: you might be a dedicated professional, but damned if they aren’t confident they can do just as well or better without all the years of work.

Dan Thomson, it would appear, ticks both these boxes. On the basis of no more experience than a single self-published novel, The Candidate – which, at 100 pages long, is more accurately a novella – and participation in a few writing classes forty-odd years ago, he applied to one of the most prestigious MFA programs in America. So, naturally, age discrimination is the only possible reason for his failure to make the cut.

That rumbling you hear is the sound of my jaw grinding bitten-off expletives into grist.

At age fifteen, I opined to my then-English teacher, a woman now sadly deceased, that the reason my story hadn’t won or placed in a contest to which I’d submitted it was genre bias against science fiction. Mildly, she replied that she knew of multiple students who’d won such contests with SF stories. “Oh,” I said, and deflated a little, and then forced myself to acknowledge the possibility that, regardless of my abilities, other people might indeed be better. Thomson’s seeming inability to make a similar deductive leap at age 68, coupled with his stated belief that “young people” lack sufficient life experience to write well, doesn’t suggest to me that he’d do well taking crit from other, younger writers – which is basically what an MFA entails, though I doubt Thomson realises it – even if the Iowa Writers’ Workshop did let him in.

And believe me, he would be subject to criticism. Oh, would he fucking ever.

A brief disclaimer: as someone who works as both an author and a critic, I make a conscious effort to review transparently. If I think there’s a problem in the text, I show my working; if I haven’t read the full book or have skimmed particular sections, I say so; and if a story hits my buttons, whether positively or negatively, I aim to make that fact clear. In the context of writing groups and editorial work, I try to set my stylistic preferences aside and focus instead on the author’s intentions: on providing feedback that helps them make their style better instead of more like mine. As such, I don’t usually weigh in on fragments or blurbs of a random writer’s work unless they’ve said something in public – such as in interview or at a convention – that suggests a direct link between their attitude about the world, or writing, or the world as expressed through writing, and the content they’ve produced.

That being so, and in accordance with his clear belief that his work merits the same respect as the would-be bests in the field, I will treat Thomson as I would any author possessed of such a glaring disconnect between their self-perception and reality: with sarcasm and sources.

According to the article’s author, Thomson didn’t pursue writing in his youth because, “at the time he lacked the perspective on life to offer more than surface finery in his prose,” with Thomson himself quoted as saying, “It’s not prejudice against young people to say, ‘You don’t have a lot of experience.'” This strongly suggests that Thomson has, for whatever reason, conflated life experience with literary skill: that, in his view, the way to improve as a writer isn’t to work on your prose, but to gain more inspiration. This perspective is echoed in the blurb for his novella, The Candidate, which is less a plot summary than a full paragraph of Thomson explaining why his book is important:

Can An Honest Man Be Elected President? I didn’t give the protagonist of The Candidate a face. I didn’t give him a body or a race either. That was not an oversight. I am confident you will do that for me. I did give him a voice and when you hear that voice you will assign him whatever characteristics seem appropriate to you. Listen to that voice. If you don’t know what Norman Telos has to say about life in America then you don’t know where you live. Does a fish know he is swimming in water? Does he know his pond, lake, river, ocean? After a series of wars, recessions and global warming we are wondering where we are and where we are going. There is a fear that rich powerful men have an agenda for America. The Carlisle Group did write a plan for the new American Century. They believe that war is good for our economy and our souls. War is of course older than the Carlisle Group. Eisenhower warned us of the Military Industrial Complex. Remember that a demand for more bombs requires that they be exploded. Mr. Telos also speaks of important economic realities for a democratic capitalist society. He reminds us of an unshakable truth that Karl Marx gave us. “Capitalist societies require a reserve army of the unemployed to keep wages down.” So we keep a pool of unemployed and poorly employed in poverty. This book is written for people who can think and want to think. It is not the Sermon on the Mount or holy writ, but a spark to your own thinking.

There are, I would submit, three possible explanations for the creation of such a blurb, none of which is flattering to Thomson: pure ego, a lack of awareness that fiction and non-fiction blurbs have different conventions, or a failure to distinguish between a blurb and a review. Either way, his assertion that, “If you don’t know what Norman Telos has to say about life in America then you don’t know where you live,” is suggestive both of hostility to criticism – if you don’t like, agree with or understand this book, then it’s no fault of mine – and a flat conflation of worldly experience with literary merit. It doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that the ethos of the fictional Norman Telos is closely aligned with that of his creator: in exhorting us to value his character’s wisdom, Thomson is, with precious little deftness, hoping we’ll praise him.

Thanks to the preview function on Goodreads, I was able to read the first two chapters of The Candidate. It is not an experience I recommend, unless you like laughing angrily at the sheer bloody-minded entitlement of untalented men.

“The name of Norman Telos’ car was an automatic talk show joke,” the book begins. Thomson swiftly proceeds to describe said car in detail for the better part of three pages, making sure to tell us that it’s the best sedan since the model-T. Only then is it made clear that, rather than being a car that Norman owns, it’s actually one he’s invented. As such, we skip immediately on to the details of his next invention, a silent machine gun sold to the DOD.

And then this happens:

Norman Telos’ next series of inventions were drone cops to solve the Ferguson problems. To Norman Telos the events that happened in Fergusson, Missouri in the summer of 2014 and the shooting of the Black boy with the toy pistol in Cleveland November of 2014 were two problems of trust that could both be solved by a machine. Blacks cannot trust the police because too many police are racists. Police fear for their own lives in confrontational situations. The answer to both problems is to put officer friendly in front of a video game screen controlling a drone that takes all the risks for him. His actions will be documented solving the age old question of who polices the police. Further, the situation was safer for both the police and the policed. The drones were armed with a machine gun for extreme situations where killing to prevent killing would justify its use. More importantly the drones were equipped with nonlethal force; air powered bean bag guns that could knock any perp on his back and if he refused to surrender the bean bags could be shot at him until he had no ability to resist, an arm that carried hand cuffs to the perp and finally the machine itself was powerful enough to push over several men.

RACIST POLICING IS SOLVED FOREVER, EVERYONE CAN GO HOME NOW HAHAHA FOR SERIOUS OH WAIT oh god why.

The description of the drones goes on for several more pages. Comparisons to both R2D2 and Robocop are made – hilariously so, though comedy is clearly not the intent. Crime falls, Norman grows ever richer from his inventions, and the reader’s will to live takes a savage beating. Then, just as I was about to schedule an emergency splenectomy to help inure myself to this nonsense – taking cops out of physical danger doesn’t remove their racism, which is the actual fucking problem here, and especially not when you arm them with machine guns, are you kidding me? – I reached the wonder of Chapter 2, which suddenly introduces a Female Character! And oh. Oh, my god. YOU GUYS:

The beautiful young blond with a face like Ingrid Bergman was a two thousand dollar a day call girl. She was flown to Norman Telos’ yacht anchored in Mobile bay by helicopter. At 4 in the afternoon Norman and Jane Gray were lying relaxed and naked in Norman’s king sized bed sipping martinis. Jane asked, “So what is next for you Norm?”

Norman, “Two hours of latency recovery and then either my 65 year old penis will rise on its own for more loving or I will give it more chemical inducement.”

Jane, “That is a rather crude not too funny joke which makes me feel cheap. I may make a lot of money on this job but I refuse to be treated like or talked to like a whore. Call for your helicopter. You can have a refund.”

Norman, “Sorry. I truly didn’t mean to insult you. Please don’t be so sensitive. I saw it as a joke at my expense.”

Jane, “Ok. By next I didn’t mean here and now between us. I wanted to know what you are going to do with your billionaire career. What is next?”

Norman, “I am going to run for President.”

Jane, “Wow. I never expected to hear a thing like that and take it seriously, but coming from you, of course. So why do you want to be President.”

Norman, “I don’t really want to be President. I want to run. Winning is unlikely and would probably be a bore. Besides I will be running on the Democratic side and Diebold is likely to sell the next election to the Republicans.”

It’s at this point that I stopped breathing properly and had to wheeze into my cupped hands for several minutes. (Also, lest you think that Thomson is some sort of geriatric savant who accidentally presaged our decent into the darkest timeline, I’d note that The Candidate was published in February 2016, well after Donald Trump announced his intention to run for President. Whatever other similarities lie therein, I’ll leave to a more intrepid soul to fathom.)

Norman and Jane continue to talk for the rest of the chapter. I only skimmed after that, but not distractedly enough to miss Norman posing this serious philosophical query: “Is there a god or a dyslexic dog?” Jane doesn’t answer, but that’s not surprising: she’s pretty much there as a prop to give Norman an excuse to extemporise in detail about Why Religion Is Wrong. Only then, mercifully, did my free sample come to an end.

At a base technical level, Thomson doesn’t know enough about prose writing to include the word “said” and a comma after each character name, or how to indicate the possessive for a proper noun ending in s, or any of the basic rules of pacing, structure or grammar. Even so, no line edit in the world can fix this mess. The prose is didactic and clunky in a way that only comes from being wrongly convinced of the brilliance of bad ideas, while the introduction of Jane Gray is the literal embodiment of How Not To Write A Female Character. Culturally, we spend a lot of time mocking female writers for their (supposedly) thinly-veiled self-insert characters, and yet I can say with authority that I’ve never encountered any such work by a teenage girl that manages to be anywhere near as obnoxiously obvious as the equivalent fantasies written by grown men.

So, yeah: Dan Thomson, whatever he might like to think, did not fail to get into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop because of age discrimination, but because his writing fails to meet even the most basic grammatical and structural standards you would reasonably expect a high school English graduate to know. But let’s by all means keep up the steady flow of editorials claiming whiny entitlement is a millennial problem. Like the proverbial five o’clock, it’s always a slow news day somewhere.

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