slackmistress:

So it’s awesome when Jodie Foster shows her boobs when she’s getting gang-raped in The Accused, but it’s not awesome when Lena Dunham shows her boobs when having consensual sex on Girls.

Thanks for clearing that up, dudes.

Advice from Roxane Gay I keep thinking back to, for myself or my friends or as a general life philosophy:

Good writing is what gets a writer, myself included, into fancy publications. I’m one of those writers who has gotten most (90%) of my publications by sending my work through the submission queue. There’s no magic to the process.

Writers often like to conjure up elaborate conspiracy theories about how to break into the upper tier publications through “networking” because it’s more comforting to believe it’s who you know rather than what you write.

I’m not going to pretend that sometimes, it helps to be well connected, but it is definitely possible to live in the middle of nowhere, and write as best you can, and submit that work and hope you’ll get a chance. 

How do I do it? I write a lot, I read a lot, I submit a lot, I take editorial suggestions, and I suck up rejection.

I tell younger journalists especially that as much as they develop their writing skills, they need to develop their pitching skills.

No matter what level you’re at, even when the “yes” comes faster, you will spend your life as an “ideas person” trying to convince other people - a/k/a pitching them - that your idea is worth putting someone’s time/money/interest/promotion behind. A great story that you can’t pitch - in a meeting, in an email, in a tweet - isn’t going to do you much good. 

When I spent a year freelancing for Us Weekly, covering 3-5 red carpet events a week, it was like a crash refresher course in the most basic of interviewing skills - and I’m grateful for it every day. A year-plus of nightly live shows - most of which involved pitching somewhere between 5 and 15 stories on any given morning - has been similarly brutal but useful.

So much of being a working writer is just about being a workhorse. And at least 90 percent of pitching is failing, or finding the better story somewhere buried inside your awful pitch. But you have to get back up and say, “How about this, then?”

breakthecitysky:

We started therapy, grudgingly, because I was worried that he would get branded a troublemaker at age 5.  He started telling me he was stupid. He would curl up with me on the couch at night and tell me how badly he wanted friends to play with.  He got so anxious about going to school he made himself physically sick, more than once.  I decided it was the school’s fault, and looked into open enrollment elsewhere.  The classes were too full.  The teachers were subpar.  Those were the only logical explanations. 

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Go read this amazing essay about discovering your bright, gifted little boy might need more help than you’d realized.

(Very proud to have had a small hand in helping shape this piece, and to know both the boy and mama in question.)