I’ll piss some people off with this. 

Nick Mamatas, one of my favorite authors, has long been an advocate of getting paid for your writing work (note: potentially inflammatory link), which makes perfect sense to me.

If I put in 20 - 40 hours writing and revising a story, a simple “Hey, that’s a neat story, Michael,” won’t suffice. I’d want the money. I can use money. I can buy things with money, like more printer paper or ink cartridges, things that increase my productivity so people can further enjoy or deride my work. Exposure is fine, but what purpose does it serve? Seems like there are easier ways to get an ego stroking than writing short stories.

However, here in the small press world, there’s a tendency to adopt a “money = PURE EVIL” attitude. Somehow, not getting paid is seen as sticking it to The Man. In reality, there is no Man trying to keep you down, only the sum of your efforts.

It’s easy to believe your work is too revolutionary or underground. It’s easy to blame the publishing industry or the mainstream or any other collective scapegoats. However, going back to Mamatas, his first novel was a Beat road adventure coupled with the Cthulhu mythos in which Kerouac and Burroughs save the world from a demonic cult. I don’t think it gets less mainstream than that. And, yes, he was paid a nice sum.

There’s a difference between being too revolutionary to get paid and being too mediocre to get paid. All creative types have work that they’d rather forget about. I certainly have many pieces that I’d prefer to set aflame, but at the time, they seemed good. That’s why every writing guide suggests setting aside the work for several days/weeks/months.

If you never want to make a dime from writing, then great. I respect your belief. However, perhaps you owe it to yourself and your work to make a few bucks. Don’t you deserve it?

From this essay: 

I agree with you in spirit, vicious hipster kids. Of course MTVs programming is vapid and retarded. Of course it’s incredibly depressing that the market has supported their ride down the slippery slope of Herculean atrocities against brain cells. But if I had a way to use that colossus to my own ends… I’d do it without batting an eye. And keep on going.

I’m not just pulling a Lewis Black here. You want to call MTVs programming vapid? Make Something Better. I know you can do it. But you’re going to have to sweat blood. It’s easier to throw stones. 
 

…

I want to get my work out there to people, and eat at the end of the day. I’d shoot myself in the face if I was driving an Aston Martin with $30,000 spark plugs, but I’m sipping on a pretty good 2004 Riesling right now, and I prefer it to Pabst Blue Ribbon, thank you very much.

Salon has a piece from an author who got negative reviews! It seems kind of whiney, but perhaps it holds some wisdom. 

After four years of painstaking work my novel has gotten only two reviews, and they’re both bad. So begins my stages of grief.

It’s ungracious, of course, for authors to dispute bad reviews. Lofty silence is much more dignified. Let the readers decide. The trouble is, thanks to my two bad reviews, there will be no readers, or extremely few. I don’t have that many relatives.

Just in case you’ve never stumbled across this list, here’s a massive catalog of sci-fi cliches.

I can always tell when an author has no idea how to write a female character. The story will always have an expository paragraph that goes something like this:

Then he saw her walk in the bar door. Her blonde hair cascaded over her bare shoulders, bouncing slightly with every step. Her hips swayed back and forth under a vinyl miniskirt. He wondered what type of underwear she wore–if she wore underwear at all. Her fleshy orbs threatened to escape the too-small halter top. He estimated them at a D-cup, and one seemed slightly off-level with the other, but he wouldn’t be sure until he broke out the Craftsman laser level–and maybe the table saw if he was feeling frisky.

What’s wrong with that block of reprehensible exposition? First off, Craftsman doesn’t even manufacture a laser level. Secondly, nothing in that paragraph is worth reading. The author could have simply said, “He was a normal heterosexual male in a bar,” and we could extrapolate every cliche possibility from there (if you extrapolated a priest/rabbi joke there, give yourself a hand).

Does this woman have a personality? Is she flirting with the patrons, or is she strictly there to drink? Does she slip off her wedding ring as she sits down in a group of guys? Does she have a penis? These are the questions you must ask.

In short, quit writing cardboard characters, even if they are busty blondes.