First Blog - Hallelujah!

"Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

Samuel Johnson

Hallelujah! Last night (actually the early hours of this morning) I came across this website by complete accident. I was doing the usual idle insomniac surfing, following tangent after tangent of whatever was crossing my mind with what connected on the screen. You learn the most amazing trivia this way.

Somehow I went on to actor George C. Scott's entry on the en.wikipedia.org. I learned that in 1979, he starred in a horror movie called "The Changeling" (not to be confused with the Angelina Jolie vehicle of a few years ago.). I looked up movie reviews, and most online viewers gave the film high praise. Hopefully I'll check it one day, but it started my curiosity going as to which are the best horror movies in history. A lot of people love "best of" lists, and a lot of people love horror films. I'm rarely impressed by them today - I can sense the cornstarch in the blood or the camera just off-screen. Nonetheless, I was open to reading about great films that play on the audience's collective fear, so I kept on looking.

Critic Richard Corliss in Time.com has a deft list of 25 films, and many are not the usual choices. He mentions esoteric foreign pics like "Men Behind The Sun," which I literally do not know I could stomach, and he mentions a children's classic "Bambi," which actually has a scene that is a horror or shock to most children (though the most shocking cartoon to me was a "Looney Tunes" one where Marvin The Martian threatened to blow up the Earth; it was so believable, that Marvin even to issue a disclaimer at the end that it's "only a cartoon.")

But I wasn't satisfied with that list; I wanted to hear something else, see what the average internet user thought. I wound up bumping into a review by a blogger named Best Canuck right here on associated content. I was impressed the guy was hitting on fifty movies instead of the usual ten or twenty. I could relate to the review; he was really talking to you, not at you.

Then I noticed something that might be obvious to most people, but not me (after all, it was four in the morning). I saw ads all over the web page of professional quality. Immediately I realized that this site was better funded than the usual "amateur" blogger sites. After reading some more, I was amazed to know that this site paid writers up front. Up front - what a concept! I started reading the site's blog posts and watching the users' posted videos. Regular people not only endorsing the site, but declaring their love for it (*sigh*). Again, I say Hallelujah!
I am a writer. Since college, I have written scads of poetry, letters to the editor, blog entries, short stories and two full-length dramatic plays (one I co-produced and presented). Up to now, I had just accepted some reality that I did it for love, but never for money. That always bothered me. I work very hard when I write seriously; if it were not for the fact that I love it most of the time, it would be pure drudgery. But the reason, I had not become a professional writer, was that I had become frustrated by the verdict of editors and other gatekeepers, many of whom liked my work, but did not either accept it, or pay me with anything that resembled money. Up to now I had not seen anything that served as a half-way house from amateur status to the professional scribe. But now I have. What I like the most is that I can submit to the judgment of the people, the "base, common and popular" web browser, and not some amorphous elite that decrees whether someone should become a professional or not.

The creativity out there needs to be sponsored. There is great talent, but it often comes across as sloppy, incoherent - in a word: amateurish. Sites should offer incentives, financial or otherwise, to improve the class of content out there. They will get what they, pay for, bloggers will take more pride in their work and our still-youthful internet culture will be the better for it.

New York August 20, 2009 6:55 PM EDT