Hi Kids. So here we are poised for another year of fruitless job hunts, endless expensive schooling complete with another cycle of loans and just to make the taste of failure complete I thought I’d add a few failed start-up businesses. I’m already told that YMCA also known as Mama’s Boy for Hire has already been mistaken for an illegal prostitution ring catering to older women. So sad. Anyway, here is what you can expect from us this fall and beyond.

Familiar favorites such as “Post of the Week” and “Pay My Student Loans” will be making a return.  In addition a bi-weekly “So, New to Debtor’s Prison?” will
Provide summary info. To people who are checking us out for the first time.

Administratively you may have noticed some bottlenecks aka a few days with no posts and then four or five show-up.  We are trying to monitor our posts a bit more closely due to past incidents (ahem Triforce) and that pertains to comments too so bare with us ye few yet faithful.

So anyway thanks for reading these past seven months or so and please stick with us as we march on to 100,000 hits and hopefully a one year anniversary!

This is the last post by our guest columnist Tom Wick.  We wish him the best in establishing himself as an author and thank him for his contributions to this blog.

So it’s almost labor day or depending on how quickly Benito’s admin is posting things perhaps even past then…so this will probably be my last regular post. Thank you to all the automated phishing programs that left comments.  So I wanted to do two things: leave you with some kind of departing word of wisdom and talk about the scam blogger who recently revealed her real identity while simultaneously trying to hock a self-published book.

The first part easy. Success is like a wave, once it reaches it’s foamy peak, it’s too late to ride it if you’re still on the beach. What I mean is once you’ve read Hairy Potter or Twilight it’s too late to write about sorcerers and werewolves EVEN IF you have a very original take, because your good work is going to get lost in the noise of the copycats. If you’re successful most likely it will be by doing something nobody has thought of or by writing something that becomes timely on the verge of it’s completion. This is more than just being lucky. Ever wonder how the championship hats for the winning team get made in time for the post game interview? Of course the hats are made for both teams ahead of time. If you want to guarantee success you need to take this approach…except for you there are more than two possible answers there are infinite and it’s a book not a hat.

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As I was cutting the crusts off the cucumber and cottage cheese sandwiches I was making for my mother’s book club and looking at the automated job rejections appear on my hotmail account (after all who reads job apps on the weekend) suddenly it hit me – the idea that was going to get me the best kind of employment, self-employment.

45 minutes later as I was refilling Mrs. Beraducci’s tea I ran the idea by her. See, she’s always complaining about her no-good sons who never come by, call or visit (as if a medical residency, semester abroad or deployment to Iraq was any excuse) and is always visibly jealous of my mom whenever I replace a light bulb, clean out the garage or drive to Whole Foods with her canvas bags so she can get the 5 cents per bag discount. She loved the idea. They say every chronicly unemployed person eventually tries to start their own business. With that in mind may I present Young Men for domestic Companionship and Ambience or YMCA.

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These keep getting better and better folks!

“The Help” mentioned by that narcissistic asshole that is Mike Triforce illustrates the point I made in my last entry (see rich writer). My favorite is how her story is essentially born with silver spoon in mouth, grew up to be rich house wife, had servants all my life, wrote the book they never had the time to write nor contacts to get published…and in the interview all she and the author talk about is how tired SHE is… Its enough to make you want to puke. Sadly this phenomenon is not uncommon. The Kite Runner was written by a doctor who was already rich. But I warned you. Stop whining. Take your licks. Focus. Deep breath. Now ask yourself, do you want to write fiction or non-fiction?

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Here’s the latest from Mr. Thomas Wick

Summer is drawing to a close and I feel obligated to in part the occasional island of useful information in a sea of bitching and moaning that can only come from a bleached boned starving artist.  That island is…classify and avoid other writers.  Published authors will tell you that writing, like anything else, requires you to be on the “scene” mingling with other practitioners of your craft.  I find this to be self-serving bullshit and not just because of the countless examples from Thoreau to that doctor who wrote the Kite Runner to Twain all new and took advantage of solitude but because well, where can you meet other writers? I know! I’ll take a course…no doubt offered by one of these writers to pad their incomes on the dreams of romantic fools hoping to write the world’s next best seller.
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It’s that time of year again. I think it starts with the back to school commercials for Staples and Target. School reminds those of us on skid row and in Debtors Prison that time really is passing and not in a good way. For the chronically unemployed August is when you start looking for and filling out applications for jobs to be sent the Tuesday after Labor Day. This will be my third Tuesday after Labor Day of Unemployment. The first one I sent out 100 applications sure I would get my pick of jobs. Last year I sent out 300 sure I would get a job. This year I will send out 500 sure licking envelopes on materials that still need to be mailed will dry out my throat. Debtors Prison is like San Diego: weather is always the same. Unemployment has seasons and I would say the beginning of the “unemployed year” is August 1st.

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It’s already August folks so if you have comments or questions for our guest columnist now would be the time to ask.

There is only one thing worse than rejection: rejection by ommissiom. After my first two years of writing I got the hang of the whole initial query process. In fact even now I am impressed how quickly I can compile a list of agents and get a query out of the virtual door. But just as the worst lies we tell are those where we withhold key information the worst rejections are those where the key information – namely the agent no longer has any interest in our work – is withheld perhaps indefinitely.

Look, I am a patient man. I looked forward to Christmas like any other kid but it never drove me insane. Neither did the wait for my driver’s license, the vote, or legal drinking. Even when I query I can forget about the letters as soon as they are sent and throw myself back into an unfinished project. I get a form rejection and it rolls off my back like water off a baby hippo.

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I love summer. But it doesn’t fool me. I remember last summer when I’d been unemployed for not that long and I had the experience that made me what I currently think of as me. I’d like to call our attention to those of us in Debtor’s Prison who’ve been laid off several times and thus would never bring anything personal to an office or attend a non-mandatory office function even if they were to win the Presidency.

So there I was – well here really but instead of blogging I was looking for jobs when I got an email from a cousin for the perfect job, an adjunct professorship at George Mason. Even better this professor also routinely did legal research/work as a part-time associate at the head of the department’s law firm. Even better they were in a hurry to get someone – a big hurry.  They were willing to take EITHER a JD or a PhD in the final stages of their work or even someone with comparable accomplishments/experience. I had all three and a family connection.

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Here’s the latest from Mr. Tom Wick!

The subject of today’s post was going to be writing your first query letter, something that I am actually good at as I have gotten more than my fair of agents to take that first step and at least request to see my work.  However before I go there I wanted to say how truly depressing it is to write a post called “Tales of an Unpublished Author”…it’s like if there was a position on a sports team called “phlegm target.” As someone constantly suffering from underemployment and looking for work their is enough rejection in my life from employers and women.  This adds a whole new dimension to that.

While we’re on the subject let me say this one thing about alcohol.  Yes, it does help you write.  HOWEVER, you will be rendered even more incapable of assessing the quality of said writing, leading to a cycle where you drink, sober up, read what you wrote, are embarassed and then drink until it sounds good again…so good that you add to it until you eventually sober up, and well you get the idea.

Alright.  Finally.  A Query.

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Well not according to our own personal hit count, but possibly given the amount of attention the subject of “scam blogging” is getting in fact ATL’s own David Lat has just written a post called ” In Defense of Going to Law School ” perhaps he realized that if people really did heed his advice then eventually the website he started would be useless… Bit it’s all good he had a good ride and besides he’s debt free. Though I am not bitter because I’ve gotten laid during the current administration and didn’t just get blamed for killing my mom’s flowers who I don’t live with during the heat wave… OH WAIT.

I guess I should post the link for those of you who stumbled upon this page and have no idea what I am talking about…

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-going-to-law-school/

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