This is brilliant, bitter, bitterly brilliant, what have you: but if nothing else, it is a fascinatingly brutal essay, chock-full of absolutely necessary advice to aspiring writers. A taste:
Buzz is nothing. Getting your name out there is nothing. All of the positive mentions and trackbacks and Facebook hits from that piece you did for somebody’s vanity project website are nothing. Money isn’t everything. But you can use it to buy food. Want to call yourself a writer? Get paid. Eat. Pay the rent. Never doubt that a generation of young “writers” is publishing endlessly, never getting paid, convinced that tomorrow some magazine will call and they’ll get to sign the Rich and Famous contract like from The Muppet Movie. Those people are idiots. They are also your competition.
It’s a tough life, to be sure.