Category / Writing

by Edward Champion

Brian Farnham, The Biggest Deadbeat Editor in New York

brianfarnham.jpgAs Choire Sicha reported back in September, Brian Farnham, the editor of Time Out New York is not a big fan of paying his freelancers. And that includes me. I wrote a profile piece for them in July, but didn’t get payment for it until four months later. And the only reason I was able to effect payment that quickly was through persistent emails and phone calls, going directly up the ladder to Farnham. I did, after all, have rent to pay. Farnham made repeated promises about the check coming from Chicago. This never happened. And after several communications from me, his staff had to cut a check from the New York office — something that the TONY cronies had previously told me was “impossible” — and I had to go down there and pick it up at their office. Because given the constant misrepresentations, I didn’t trust them to get my address correct.

A few weeks after another piece I wrote for them ran, I sent an email to find out what the status was on this second payment, thinking I might experience the same four month return time and receive similar misrepresentations from the TONY offices. I never received a reply. I followed up two weeks later. The Editorial Coordinator wrote back telling me that she was “checking in with our accounts payable department to find out when your check will be cut.” I left a voicemail asking for more specifics. The Editorial Coordinator hadn’t bothered to inform me in her email that, oh actually, “the financial director is on vacation this week.” I fired back a forceful but reasonable email, telling them that I would call their office “every day from Monday on — with equitable and reasonable intervals, I assure you — until we resolve this dispute, until we have a definite answer, and until there is a check in my hands.”

This afternoon, I got a phone call from Farnham. It was an effort to try and shake me up. I had experienced this approach before by bullies in high school, but hadn’t seen much action in my adult life outside of bars and law firms. “How dare you!” he screamed at me repeatedly over the phone. “Who do you think you are?” These were lines out of a bad melodrama. I responded with facts. I pointed out that I was not the one who had allowed four months to pass before the last check. I pointed out that I was not the one to let two weeks pass before replying to a payment query and repeated that I was completely understanding of a delay in payment, if only the efforts were communicated in a forthright manner. “You’ll get your check,” he seethed, sounding like a frat boy who can’t get a new pledge to hand him his beer bong.

When it was clear to Farnham that I could not be shaken up, that I would be polite but not kiss his ass (apparently, I was the asshole for being a professional and following up on payment), this infuriated the man. So he followed up with an alpha male threat that I “would not write for Time Out New York or any other magazine I edit.” Perhaps because of his Everest-sized ego, it apparently hadn’t occurred to Farnham that I’m not a fan for writing for publications that don’t honor communication, much less timely payment. Every place I have written for has always communicated with me in precise and reasonable terms, communicating to me when a check is late and being honest in every way. Most people, I believe, are kind and reasonable. “That’s fine,” I said, “I have no interest in employing my professional services for fucking deadbeat douchebags.” He hung up. A coward and a bully to the last.

I should point out that I think Michael Miller is a fine and demanding books editor. Because of this, I was happy to arrange the Sacks profile with him on short notice, getting a copy of the book the day before I had to interview the man and staying up during one twenty-hour stretch to read and prepare and ask Sacks questions he hadn’t been given before. So on this note, I regret the developments.

But if you are pondering writing for Time Out New York or any publication Brian Farnham is involved in, I present this anecdote to reveal just what you might be in store for.

You see, a writer is as much of a professional as a plumber, a barista, a lawyer, or a doctor. They have rents to pay and mouths to feed. Why is it then that so many want to screw them over?

[UPDATE: Emily Gould is a sweetheart. And for what it’s worth, Farnham had his deputy messenger me the check this morning.]

by Edward Champion

But It Took Him Considerably More Than 14 Minutes to Move On

Chronicle of Higher Education: “Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it took Prestigious University Press to reject my proposal to edit a book of new essays on an early-modern philosopher. Apparently that’s the time it took the acquisitions editor to receive my e-mail message, open the 10-page attachment, make a professional judgment, and then write back with a curt one-sentence rejection stating that my proposal was ‘too specialized’ for the press’s successful series of handbooks on individual thinkers. That’s also how long it took me to go into the kitchen, eat a sandwich, and return to my computer to find his reply.”

You know, most of the time, a writer doesn’t get any kind of reply at all.

(via John Fox)

by Edward Champion

All Roads Lead to Writing

John Baker coaxes Jenny Davidson to chart her writing process. And I find it very interesting. Because there are many things there that I can’t fathom (for me, the premise announces itself in the writing) and many things that I can (write something every day). But so long as all roads lead to creating work, I think it’s fantastic and that it doesn’t really matter what road takes you there. Perhaps personal temperament — and not some horrible seminar that tells a starry-eyed hopeful the absolute way to write — is the thing that determines how one goes about this discipline.

by Edward Champion

Love/Hate Write

To answer Jason Boog’s query over whether writers hate to write or love to write or what not, here is my answer on the subject:

I love to write. I love having written. I hate to write when my brain doesn’t work and when I end up writing drivel or I fail to challenge myself. But this is not endemic to the writing itself, but a rather ruthless castigatory impulse directed towards self. I don’t hate having written. I am a goal-oriented monkey and I can sometimes convince friends to throw bits of banana into my mouth; from this vantage point alone, I suppose I must love writing, even though writing is nowhere nearly as easy as it looks and there is that synaptic problem of mediocre prose sprouting forth like fungi on a white screen. There is clearly some sadistic part of me that likes to kill the fungi, slashing at it with blue pen or selecting text and nuking the site from orbit with one mighty push of the DELETE button. But when I write and there is nothing but fungi, I don’t necessarily hate the writing. Write better you bastard! Thoughts along those lines. I do sometimes hate the fact that fungi is all I’m good for, thus causing me to question whether there is a capable mind inside my thick skull (partial answer: there is, I suppose, but why dwell on it and become a smug megalomaniac when there’s a fascinating world of exciting people to contemplate!). Thus, how one answers this question of being a writer says a lot about the writer himself. Writing is work. It is sometimes difficult, sometimes easy, but it is not a painful process. Compare writing to working in an office or a maquiladora. Get some perspective, for Christ’s sake. Trying to figure out how to pay the rent is a painful process, but how one decides to do it or the degree of difficulty that one places in paying the rent is a matter of choice, depending upon how one’s interests run against the system that runs our world. But spare me this nonsense over whether you love or you hate writing and simply write and write the best prose you can with love and life attached to it.

Writers who don’t love writing are easy to spot. As for John August, it would seem to me that he does not love writing and that he has not loved writing ever since his fantastic screenplay, Go.