Uncle John

While I was in publishing, I did a lot of freelance writing. My longest gig was with the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series. (They paid $0.32/word, which is pretty excellent.) My name's in the list of contributors for each book I was published in, but the articles themselves are unattributed.

So this weekend I was going through the 15 anthologies I was published in and putting asterisks next to the articles I wrote. (They very nicely always sent me a copy of the book when it was published. There was only one that was missing, which was marked as "delayed" in my internal tracker, so I'm guessing they delayed publication, eventually published, and didn't send copies. I ordered a copy of that one to complete my collection.)

This is the weirdest exercise. I have an excel that I used to track my submissions, the requests for and deadlines for edits, whether the article was accepted or rejected, and when I was paid for it. The thing is, these were all work-for-hire, so they rewrote my articles at will, and very frequently retitled them.

So going through the published books with my tracker, I could find maybe 75% of the articles. For the remainder, I have all the word files, so I went to those to see the subject matter, then used that to find the article. I've located all of them at this point, but:
- There are the articles that I remember clearly and could find easily (like the one on New Jersey's Jaws, or the history of Mustangs (the horse, not the car)).
- There are articles that I swore I wrote that I did not write. (I never wrote an article on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, though I certainly researched it. I'm guessing they already had one from another contributor. For that book, I wrote an article on other major NYC fires, like the General Slocum.)
- There are articles that are so heavily edited as to be unrecognizable. Like, I did an article of 12 most influential albums of all time (and I will never write a list article again, they are such a pain in the ass), where I remember the editor disagreeing with my choices. In the published article, she swapped out about half of them. I still got paid for all the words in the final article, but I only "wrote" about half of it. (An example--I had NWA's Straight Outta Compton on there as influential on the gangsta rap genre. I mean, you can argue, but I wanted to be diverse as to what genres of music were being influenced in this list. She pulled that one right out, and replaced it with a polka album.)
- There are articles that I wrote--I have the word doc--and were published that I have *zero* recollection of. Like, apparently I wrote an article about Piano Island in China. And the Keys Ranch in California. And Rolling Rock beer. And an OSU football game called the Snow Bowl. I couldn't tell you anything about any of these topics now.

What's also weird, going back to these, is UJ's business model essentially evaporated while I was writing for them. I was writing what would now be Buzzfeed articles--short little things that make you go "huh" that fill up 5 spare minutes in your day. But these are published in book form. Which means they're filled with weirdly dated things now.

Like my article on the Philly cheesesteak (which has a tone of authority about what really Philly people believe/say about cheesesteaks, which I would love someone from Philly to tell me if that's accurate, cause though I have visited there, I have zero firsthand knowledge). This article ends with a bit about how John Kerry embarrassed himself on the campaign trail by ordering a cheesesteak with Swiss cheese. And then I have a throwaway line about the governor of Massachusetts calling cheesesteaks "not real food." This book was published in 2009. The governor of Massachusetts was Mitt Romney.

I also have an article about the cat herding Superbowl ad (if anyone remembers that now) and about how the iPod changed the music industry.

I still call my home computer Uncle John, because I was only able to replace my college computer because of the Uncle John money (and I think the computer after that too). I am still weirdly proud of all of this, though these books are ephemera and I'm sure will go/are already out of print.

I can say, truthfully, that I've been published in an anthology with John Scalzi, though. He was also a contributor.