Here are some numbers.
I wrote for Television Without Pity from 2001-2014. For half of that time it was a private concern; we were bought out by NBCUniversal in 2007. In March of 2014 I turned 36. That means my young adulthood, from 21 to 36, was spent growing up in public. I think that probably explains a lot.
Most of the founders and founding writers left, after a year if required, and editorial was taken over by a team operating out of 30 Rock. To be specific, Brilliant But Canceled was a Trio property that Bravo acquired, who acquired us. Anyway I grew close with them.
I was never close with the founders. I think at least one of them has me blocked on Twitter! But as one of the few remaining recappers and moderators, not to mention the most prolific by a mile, I spent a lot more time getting to know my Bravo editors. I even visited the office once, on a visit to Brooklyn.
Once we were bought, I was able to stop working outside the home and just write for TWoP. It wasn’t huge money but I’m a simple dude and my needs are simple. It was a very nice time to be me, getting to do what I loved and interacting all day pretty much solely with people who loved the same things I did.
One morning, and I remember it was a Thursday because I was late on a deadline to recap the Good Wife episode where Will dies. As I was getting in the shower, I received a message from my friend Heather Hogan asking if I was okay. I kind of felt a movement in the air that told me what was about to happen, and then the email came through: As of that morning in March 2014, TWoP was ceasing operations.
(As an employee of a large multinational, our payment system was Byzantine, with anywhere from 30- to 90-day waits on checks. So suddenly I had no job, but all the work I’d been contracted to do over the next several weeks or months, I forget, was paid out at once, in a sort of severance. It is hard to describe how much of the edge of this bad news was blunted by that info.
Because of various things we’ll probably talk about someday, my self-worth and mood are very tied to money, on a very small scale. If I have five dollars, I’m happy. If I don’t have five dollars, and as a freelancer for 15 years I didn’t always have five dollars, I’m depressed. Like I said, I’m a deceptively simple dude.)
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Anyway I got back in the shower, to get out again only when I had a plan. Probably not the most conservation-minded behavior, but these were circumstances. I reached out to Annalee Newitz at io9.com, a Gawker vertical, with all my bona fides and 15 years of readership, and within an hour I was in an email chain with Nick Denton. (A vertical is a sub-site; Nick Denton founded Gawker.)
So the original plan was, I wanted a staff job at io9. But what ended up happening was, I was given my own vertical, Morning After, with a freelance budget and a mandate to write about television while also serving as Editor. I flew back to NYC and stayed in a creepy sex hotel in Chelsea for four days, which consisted of two meetings totaling 45 minutes and the rest of the time being nervous and invisible in and around the Gawker offices.
There is nothing worse than being only half at the table. Years later I was interviewing for a job at Facebook through a third party, with no room to negotiate, but with one dealbreaker demand: That we wouldn’t be treated differently from the “real” Facebook employees, shunned from lunch tables or left out of perquisites.
I don’t know where my fear of being treated this way came from* but I do know that every time it’s kicked up, my instincts have been correct.
*(I know exactly where it came from. I am older than my oldest siblings by 7 years and the only child of my parents, which meant fitting halfway into not one family but two, always between, never “in.” This is also why I’m weird about money, because one of my families I didn’t belong in was wealthy and the other one was hippie-chic poverty, so money ended up meaning not just the myriad of incorrect things it means to poor people, but also being weaponized among the rich.)
So after my four days of invisibility, I took a tour down the East Coast for the first time, visiting close friends in D.C. and Virginia. By the time I was home in Austin I’d worked up a list of maybe 100 freelancers I wanted writing for me, and a basic editorial calendar and production schedule that would allow them us do it. I also walked blindly into a few mistakes, like trying to recruit people who’d already been chewed up and spit out by Gawker, that sort of thing.
It was also around these few weeks that I debuted While You Are Over There, the found-footage SF novella that remains my most profitable self-published work. I was riding high!
Gawker talent at that time was Caity Weaver, Tom Scocca, Sam Biddle, Jordan Sargent, JK Trotter, Hamilton Nolan, sweet Adam Weinstein and Max Read, among the many serious hitters. And I was definitely sitting at a different table, which kept me invisible — and thanks to the social vagaries of remote work, which I’d mostly avoided in recapping by only talking to my editors — kept me paranoid and insecure, as well. New feelings I wasn’t familiar with.
But we had a lot of good work from a diverse group of writers, and with the help of our Deputy Editor’s nimble skill we hit our numbers. Then came the pivot — I was asked to give up the editing and freelancers and move to writing for Gawker full-time.
Which was, of course, the original plan — but didn’t feel correct, now, and it was hard to pivot. After months of feeling confirmed in my insecurities and cut off from what were in some ways my literary heroes of the time I froze up, burnt out, and left after less than a year.
Within a year or so Gawker was gone, sued out of existence by Peter Thiel.
Again, I left with enough money to feel okay and a whole self-publishing plan in place, which is when Outriding and Wasted Beauty began in earnest, as serials. (A third and fourth were planned, to alternate weeks every month — a postapocalyptic shapeshifting gender story called Holder Stone and rural fantasy cycle called Kenning Cross — but I stayed at weekly installments for the first two, to begin with.)
This was another time of true adventure, making enough money between the serials and the “remastered” recaps to live at the level I was used to. This is when I should have started a Patreon, I was told repeatedly, but my ego was too decimated from my (typical) Gawker experience to even market Wasted and Outriding much, to say nothing of the inherent risk in asking for support.
I am Gen X in some tiny ways; one of those ways is my stark terror of ever being caught wanting anything, or trying anything. The idea of actually selling myself, marketing the work I was producing — nevermind that doing so was key to the project — was paralyzing.
This is a form depression takes, of course, this sense that no amount of hard work can make up for one’s essential worthlessness, but I was years way from realizing that.
I was also years away from realizing that Gawker had happened so fast I never really processed the death of TWoP — never grieved the loss of something that accounted for one-third of my life on this Earth.
So I had this beautiful project that was getting attention and promised growth in direct proportion to the amount of myself that I put into it, which is a recipe for success but also, if the chemical romance isn’t in place, a recipe for serious darkness.
I’m the luckiest guy on Austin’s East Side, I know there are worse things than watching something successfully fueled by belief fall apart in the sudden absence of that belief — knowing that if you could get out of bed and throw yourself back on that fire, you could pull yourself out of it, knowing that you owe it to the people who fueled that belief in turn, and simply being unable to do it. But it’s definitely one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me personally: It’s tragic and it’s medical and unbelievably frustrating.
This is also when I had my first run-in with Bad Agents and bad actors in a Hollywood sense, which is not an interesting story so much as it is a common one. The upshot being that, by the peak of my depression, I also had a pilot and a feature and several novels out of my hands and out of my control… With nothing but a vague hope that one day the phone would ring, no matter how many times I and others told myself that’s not how it happens.
That’s a slow death that I think all of us have fallen for at some point, but given that it also involved money and brokenness, I was in deep trouble. The riptides came closer than they’ve ever come, and that’s very close indeed.
I finished the first two volumes of Wasted and the first novella’s worth of story on Outriding, got through literally half a million words of Pretty Little Liars recaps redone, as well as a few other scattered volumes. I designed the next edition of Wasted and at least 30 recap collections, and then had myself a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown. The biggest disappointment but also the most symbolic thing is that by design, Wasted, for now, ends mid-sentence.
That’s exactly what It was Like.