This was originally written in 1998, and appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 4, Issue 2. This might be funnier if you know who Carolyn and Mandy really are. Or not.

The only massacred was my pride.

BIG-HATTED WOMAN, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?

A Day in the Life of Your Editor: The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in Hoboken, New Jersey

Back in March I was invited to the home town of two of my lovely assistants, known here as Mandy Cuervo and Carolyn Millivanilli in order to protect their reputations, to watch a lame parade and then drink all day. What follows is a report on our activities. It is my hope that this will help others who are victims of the “Big Hats” at these parades; my therapy is ongoing.

TIME-LINE OF THE BIG HATS

11:30am: I arrive. Mandy, is frying bacon naked in the kitchen. Carolyn had already consumed an entire bottle of champagne and is passed out on the floor. I step over her gently.

12:00 noon: The sound of the Clancy Brothers on the stereo awakens Carolyn, who immediately begins a painful, off?key wailing I quickly identify as singing. Mandy has put on overalls. I sneak into Carolyn’s room to phone Ken West desperately, promising him 50 dollars if he will join us.

12:30 pm: After consuming six pounds of bacon and two Mimosas each, I am experiencing heart palpitations, Carolyn is once again unconscious and Mandy threatens to disrobe again to attend the parade “alfresco.” I bundle the women out the door and we march up to Washington Street, which shows absolutely no signs of a parade occurring there this day.

1:00pm: We meet friends and friends-of-friends at Sullivan’s bar for a drink. The friends-of-friends are snooty, and Mandy tearfully threatens everyone in the bar with serial nudity unless they are nice to her. Carolyn quickly attracts a crowd of men, and dances for them.

1:05pm: Having been politely asked to leave by the Bar’s management, we strike boldly out to find a good viewing place for the parade.

1:06pm: distracted by a bar called Mile Square, we enter to bolster our resolve with a pint and the women don attractive, humongous, bright green hats which are just slightly larger than the women themselves. Carolyn gathers a crowd of drunken men around her and allows them to place things in her hat. Mandy pretends she has “lost” her socks, a foreboding warning of things to come.

1:30pm: while the women hoot and flash the bagpipers marching by, I notice police forming a line around us and closing in, so I begin backing away slowly. Ken West arrives and attacks us with Silly String. Mandy is delighted and claims his silly string has “ruined” her T?shirt, and happily removes it. We decide to move on and have to extricate Carolyn from a large crowd of police, who are clapping their hands and hollering as she dances for them.

2:00pm: We arrive at a bar called Hennesey’s, where Carolyn immediately finds a group of men to surround herself with. Ken, Mandy and I have drinks at the bar. Mandy’s hat keeps overbalancing her, and she eventually finishes our visit there sitting on the floor, drinking anything handed to her. When we leave to get pizza, she has mysteriously lost her brassiere.

3:00pm: At a bar called Willie McBrides, a large crowd of men are waiting for us, applauding Carolyn and holding banners that read “CAROLYN MILLIVANILLI WE LOVE YOU”. We enter the bar with great difficulty due to dangerous crowding. Carolyn holds court by the bar in the back while Mandy and I are nauseated by a “dirty” dancing couple next to us. Ken arrives in the nick of time to demand we leave immediately. We must resort to force to remove Carolyn from her admirers, and in the scuffle, Mandy loses her overalls.

5:00pm: We are at The Quiet Woman after several other bars, aware of the disturbances the women have been causing, refuse to admit us. At The Quiet Woman Carolyn quickly assembles a small group of men to entertain her. Ken and I talk baseball in a quiet corner. Mandy is now wearing her large hat around herself, as clothing. She keeps bugging Ken and I to dance with her, but we refuse, knowing that this is just a ruse so she can “lose” her underwear as well.

5:10pm: Mandy has “lost” her underwear anyway, and Ken boogies with her, defeated.

10:00pm: I find myself walking along Park Avenue towards Moran’s; I have no idea where the past five hours have gone. Mandy is nude except for the huge hat she is wearing on her head. Ken has the grim look of a concentration?camp survivor. I smell like Minestrone and vaguely remember the women dancing on the bar to the tune of “Mexican Radio.” A large mob of men follows us at a safe distance, watching to see where Carolyn goes next.

10:15pm: At Moran’s Tavern, Carolyn’s arrival causes a riot. We drink Baileys and Ken and I get separated from the women as a huge wave of men enters to surround Carolyn. I claim to be Mandy’s brother.

2:00am: We leave Moran’s to have pizza and leftovers at the girls’ house. Mandy reveals that she has been hiding her clothing in her hat. Ken wisely leaves, but I am too weak and am wrestled to the ground and robbed by the women, who taunt me, calling me “little man.” I am cast out into the street and my pants are removed.

I WISH the meeting room had been this nice.

I don’t know about y’all, but when I was a kid my parents were pretty insistent that my brother Yan and I were parasites on the household, barnacles who had somehow conspired to attach ourselves to their home, sucking them dry. And as a result we were cruelly expected to have jobs from a very young age.

Now, any writers who are reading this know that being a writer comes with a hellish problem: On the one hand, we tend to know from a young age what we’re destined to do—write. In a world where most people wind up doing stuff they hate because they have no idea what they want to do, that’s a superpower. On the other hand, finding a way to monetize writing remains the Holy Grail of the writing life. In other words, finding part-time work as a long-haired teenager who liked to write stories wasn’t easy.

Thus every year my family went through the Ritual of Dad’s Friends, where Dad would essentially doll Yan and I up into church clothes and go out seeking a job for us. Most years he lined something up before we even knew what was happening, and suddenly I was being driven to an underground fight club where I was paid $5 an hour to mop the sweat and blood from the ground. But sometimes Dad’s connections failed him, and the looming specter of a Somers household without the extra income generated by their exhausted children began to loom large, making our parents cranky. Sometimes this led us to be a bit creative when it came to the job hunt. And that led me to my Evening of MLM Madness.

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When you’re a writer in 2017, you spend approximately 109% of your time thinking up clever things to Tweet in the vague, vain hope that about forty million people will Retweet it and thus declare you Cool. I’m not 100% certain how being Cool = $$$, but I am assured by everyone it can happen, and so I keep doing it.

Recently, I sent out this Tweet:

WISDOM

It got some play, and I was contacted by writers who thought this was a pretty incredible suggestion. What happens, they wondered, if you sell the pitch but can’t actually write the piece? What if you can’t support your thesis?

Look, freelance writing can be exhausting in the modern age because we’re writing short, punchy Internet essays with a short shelf life. And our corporate masters are insatiable, always eager for more content with which to attract those sweet, sweet clicks. Pitching fast and furious is the only way to make a living; I probably wrote about 500 freelance pieces last year alone, each and every one of them (with perhaps a dozen exceptions) stemming from a pitch.

That kind of volume means you can’t dawdle about wondering if a pitch idea is good (your editors will do that for you) or possible. The best way to pitch is to pitch first and think about it later, and here are three reasons why:

1. The Doubt. If you think of a great idea for an article but pause to wonder about its feasibility, you will talk yourself out of it. You’ll convince yourself it isn’t that clever, that you’ll never find any supporting information or examples, that no one will return your phone call or email. And then a month later you’ll see a similar idea on another website and you’ll kick yourself. I’ve talked myself out of great ideas and I have always regretted it.
2. The Speed. You are not the only person furiously pondering things to write about, and great ideas for posts and articles have an odd way of popping into many heads simultaneously. In other words, while you’re researching whether you can even pitch this idea, someone is pitching this idea.
3. The Challenge. Don’t play it safe. Yes, freelance writing is for profit—but it should be for fun, too. Got a crazy idea you convinced an editor to buy? Have fun trying to make it work.

In Event of Emergency

All well and good, that sense of adventure and the swagger of pitching without fear, but in all seriousness—what do you do if you brazenly pitch a weird idea, get the green light, and then realize you can’t find much information to work with? WHAT THEN, SOMERS YOU ARROGANT ASS?

First off, that rarely happens. If you can conceive of a pitch idea, then it’s within the realm of the possible. And part of writing anything, on any subject, is creativity. If you’re having trouble digging up material for your pitch, get creative. If you can’t get creative in these situations, freelancing may not be your ideal career.

If that doesn’t work:

Widen your search. Don’t be afraid to get a little loose with your interpretation of your own pitch. Look back further in time, or allow for a bit of inconsistency in your examples.

If that doesn’t work, tweak. Contact your editor and see if you can twist the pitch a little to fit what the research is telling you, or just go ahead and tweak the premise. Usually small deviations aren’t a big deal.

Now, don’t get me wrong; a big caveat here is not to pitch wildly insane ideas—you should have some expectation that you can back up your pitch. “Pitch First, Think Later” simply means you don’t need to do all the research and legwork first.

Originally written in 2007. In honor of the World Series, I’m reprinting it here.

Mr. Morgan was a great second baseman. Not so much a great play-by-play man. I am not wearing pants.

After lo these many years some of you may know me a little. You may not know what’s in my secret heart (hint: Teddy Bears and Whisky Fountains) but you know certain things: I like The Drink; I have three cats; I am frequently pantsless; I like baseball and no other sports, including sports which are not actually sports, like golf. It’s like we’re old friends, walking hand in hand along a moonlit beach.

So, you know about the baseball. As I write this, it’s early October, and that means it’s postseason time, which in turn means I’m pretty much parked in front of the television night after night, just like I have been for the past 25 years or so. There’s a lot of beer involved, a bit of screaming at the screen, and, naturally, some weeping. The weeping has nothing to do with local teams or anything—I think it’s neat when the Mets or Yankees make the playoffs, but I watched the entire 1991 series between the fucking Twins and the Braves, so I think it’s obvious I just like the damn game. I don’t know much, but I’ve learned a thing or two about baseball on TV over the years. Rule number one is, you’re better off listening to the radio. Rule number two is, Joe Morgan sucks.

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If  you’ve been watching HBO’s WestWorld, then you’re probably pretty creeped out about the coming Singularity that will result in thousands of super-strong robots murdering us all in our beds.

If you’re a writer watching WestWorld you’ve just witnessed a Master Class in Audience Trolling.

The premise of the show is pretty clear: In an unspecified future (we assume) a hi-tech resort is built where the American Wild West is recreated using robots. Essentially this is a sandbox-style video game brought to 3D life; you dress up, interact with robots you can’t tell apart from the humans, and have adventures. These adventures might include killing or even torturing a robot, or having sex with robots, or generally doing whatever you want. Guns can hurt or “kill” robots but are only minor annoyances to Guests.

So, everyone watching the first episode is immediately trying to suss out who’s a robot and who’s real. And the writers know this, and they do what ever smart writer does: They treat their readers/viewers like the enemy and they troll them.

LAST STOP FOR THE TEDDY TRAIN

We’re introduced to Teddy, played by the impossibly handsome James Marsden, as he wakes up on a train heading into WestWorld. A few Guests in front of him discuss how much fun the resort is going to be. Teddy comes into town, resist the invitations to engage in a bit of side-questing, and interacts with Dolores, the pretty rancher’s daughter who is programmed to conveniently drop some groceries so Guests can latch onto her storyline.

Teddy has obviously played this loop before. He knows his lines, and before you know it he’s back at the ranch, where Dolores’ father has just been murdered. Now this is some Wild West action. Dolores is menaced by a man in black, Teddy steps forward to defend her … and then Teddy is killed, because (surprise) Teddy isn’t a Guest. He’s a robot.

TROLLING YOUR READERS

This is good storytelling for three reasons:

1. It uses reader’s assumptions against them
2. It keeps them engaged in what is otherwise exposition—the purpose of the preceding scene is to establish the loop and that robots interact with each other independent of Guests
3. It ensures that viewers will begin speculating on who is a robot and who is a human, because you’ve established that this is a Trickster Universe

Treating your audience like the enemy means you’re in control of the narrative. Being overly friendly towards your audience means they’re in charge, because you’re trying to please them, trying to anticipate their needs like a good host. The former might seem counter-intuitive—aren’t authors supposed to please their audiences?—but it’s more effective because you’re setting the pace of discovery. And because people like to be tricked.

That last bit is one of the best things you can learn as a writer. Don’t be afraid of leading your readers on. People enjoy it when they’re fooled well. Just be certain your tricks have a narrative purpose.