On Lileks

I guess the word is out about Lileks being slowly weaned away from a paid writing gig. I’m sad for the guy, because I hate it when anybody gets fired. Even worse are these slow-mo firings from plum gigs. You know what I mean…the kind of “firing” where they never tell you that you’re fired, per se, but they let you languish in some hellish backwater part of the company until you quit. That happens to writers all the time. You’re hired to do, oh, I dunno, catalog copy. Next thing you know they can’t afford to have you just write copy so you get to answer phones and make coffee and file and before you know it your plum writing gig has turned into a secretarial job with a bit of writing on the side. Not that I would know anything about that.

That’s how they fire writers. And that’s why most of us freelance.

My favourite twist on this whole Lileks business is watching the reaction of other writers with good paid writing jobs cackle with glee about this sudden downturn in Lileks’ fortunes. From where I’ve sat as a writer, Lileks and Nall both had really nice niches carved out for themselves. In fact, to my mind they’re often similar people, albeit one is unabashedly a neocon while the other is unapologetically leftist. Still, they’re both okay writers of a similar age who fell into paid column writing. I’m just a few years younger than both, and by the time I came onto the scene those jobs were long gone–snapped up by the Nalls and Lilekses of this world–leaving folks like me to blog for no money and answer phones at publishing companies to keep the wolves from the door. I remember when Nall was downsized from my hometown paper years ago. I felt bad for her in a way, yet like most folks figured the gravy train for paid writing gigs was really more of a boxcar, and she was lucky to have partaken as long as she did.

Now I feel the same for Lileks. I’ve not read him in months because I’m deathly afraid of opening the Bleat to read the increasingly inevitable entry about the increasingly inevitable demise of Jasper (his dog). I’m sorry he’s lost his good job. I hope he can find another one. I’m pretty sure he’ll have luck, because he’s built a good network of friends and he has other readers who aren’t so afraid of losing Jasper. Nevertheless, I can’t help but point out that there is a lot of luck to the equation.

To read Roger’s take on the whole deal, hop on over to Krumm’s.

And this from Done With Mirrors. Their title pretty much says it all.