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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (186489)	2/25/2009 5:59:28 PM
From: Jill	Respond to of 306849

Well--OT to real estate, but look at Susan Orleans' bio (since she inadvertantly came up in your and my posts). She made it not only because she's supremely talented (to those who don't know her name she's author of the wonderful bestseller, The Orchid Thief) but because she was able to perfect her craft fulltime while earning a working wage--at smaller papers and eventually the New Yorker, which pays well. (Of course--it does not have a viable business model and less so every day--its cache is such that deep pockets have been willing to lose money on it). She is a print writer, her books sell. If she enjoys the online world, from twitter to online sites for poetry, it does not mean that she could have become who she was in any sense of the world if that was all that was available; or that her medium could possibly be translated to a computer screen. So a "Let them eat cake" mentality, as a friend of mine said, where only those who can afford to, can donate to the web, is a privilege that ultimately cannot sustain itself. Here's excerpts from her quirky bio: "...I studied literature and history and always dreamed of being a writer, but had no idea of how you went about being a writer - or at least the kind of writer I wanted to be: someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events. There is no guidebook to becoming that kind of writer, so I assumed I'd end up doing something practical like going to law school, much as the thought of it made me cringe. After college, I moved to Portland, Oregon (back when Portland was cappucino-free) to kill some time before the inevitable trek to law school - and amazingly enough I lucked into a writing job at a tiny now-defunct monthly magazine. That led to a job at an alternative newsweekly in Portland where I wrote music reviews and feature pieces. While I was in Portland, Mt. St. Helens erupted; I started writing for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice; I learned to cross-country ski; I failed to learn how to cook....I wrote for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe, and started work on my first book Saturday Night. Four years later I moved to New York. After moving to New York, I learned how to snowboard; wrote The Orchid Thief; became a staff writer at The New Yorker; got married; got a Welsh Springer Spaniel; learned how to order take-out food. These days I do some lecturing and some teaching, but most of the time I'm writing pieces for The New Yorker and occasionally for other magazines, and working on books." Now with publishing reeling as it is, imagine a 20-something Susan Orlean today. Not gonna happen if papers are failing right and left.