New Roll(s) / Thoughts On Writing (Patreon)

Hello! There's a bunch of new people here, so lemme give you a rundown: This is more of what I generally do here. I post some recent film rolls I've shot, and I talk about my creative process and life and culture (and sometimes the film and cameras, too. I call it "daily photo posting" even though it's not daily, it's sort of "whenever", usually anywhere between once and three times a week, because I'm terrible at running a Patreon.

I don't ever really know what people feel like paying for, and I want to share my work with the world. Most of the big pieces like yesterday's—the ones that never find an outlet—end up on here for free because I want people to read them. This is a terrible business model and I do not blame anyone for deciding it's not really worth paying for. That said, I do use Patreon to buy film and pay rent, so I deeply appreciate the support, personally.

Without further ado, here's this week's photos (two rolls of Kodak Portra 400 shot through my Fujica GW690i) to download on my Google Drive. You can peruse at your leisure on Flickr.

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I will be totally honest, I am utterly floored by the response to yesterday's piece. It was declined by my former employer, and I have been pitching basically every mainstream outlet since I quit my job with zero luck. I don't know if I'm bad at pitching, or if everyone's overworked and they don't check random pitches, or if freelancing is just kind of dead, but I assumed it was because I was bad at pitching/the story sucked.

The response to it has told me otherwise.

I suppose this is the issue I have with my writing, and how it fits into the industry of writing. I have no idea where the Venn diagram overlap of "what outlets will pay for" and "what people want to read" is. I definitely have no clue how much I write fits in that shaded area, but it's small. It's clear that as I am disgusted by displays of opulence and cruelty in a society obsessed with opulence and cruelty, the amount I write in that narrow overlap will shrink further.

This problem is exacerbated by the hollowing-out of media over the past few decades. I don't blame my former employer for not running that piece—it really wasn't a good fit for that audience—and ideally, it needed an outlet with a scope broader than just car culture. I really don't have the credentials or the skill to waltz into The New Yorker and just publish something!

But the continued destruction of written media (almost entirely at the hands of private equity and the wealthy I'm castigating in my writing) means that the sites and magazines that worked as stepping stones to The New Yorker (or HuffPo or The New Republic or Nation...) are now either gone entirely, or stagger on as content mills that use writers as grist.

So here I am, writing things that I believe people really do enjoy and that fill a need in our media ecosystem, but I have no idea how to actually get anyone to publish the words. I wish I could just make myself write the fucking car reviews that got me paid, but I am too burnt out to do it; all I can write nowadays are things that feel deeply meaningful, because I'm simply too scared to focus on anything else.

Right now I'm trying to land two more pieces (one is a history of fascism and automobiles, and the other is the pragmatic and moral case to sell your Tesla), and I've heard very little from anyone. I may just publish them here in the coming days, especially the Sell Your Tesla piece, as I believe it is desperately important right now, but I really just want something with a slightly broader audience than "my Patreon" for a public-awareness piece like that.

I suppose all I can say, definitively, is this: thank you for reading my work, and for the kind words. I am shocked and flattered and it has given me the motivation to keep trying. I hope one of these days things get a little less scary, but I will not give up no matter what. In the meantime, I hope you like the photos.

<3 Vicki