Well, I guess they don't call this the Now Generation for nothing.

Consider all the folk who want to write, or think they want to write, and pay for the privilege of having their poem (especially) or tale or whatever printed in an anthology, in the hope somebody will notice. You'd be surprised how many there are, and how many writers make their actual living servicing this market.

Consider all the folk waiting tables and paying for the privilege of prancing on stages in godawful places like (gasp) mid-coast Maine, hoping somebody will notice and they'll get their break on Broadway or in Hollywood. You'd be surprised how many there are, and how many productions, especially in "summer stock" or marginal markets, survive on these wannabes.

The real jobs in these fields are almost never advertised - and certainly not on craigslist or job search bulletin boards. So it's no surprise that the "jobs" that do find their way onto these places are so hopeless. And they will do nothing to make one the contacts needed to crack the real market, to get access to the job notices that matter. Even the "pay to publish" scams are likely to be better than this.

I look at it this way. Bloggerparty gives me an opportunity to discover whether anyone out there cares what I have to write about. And if they don't, well, at least I haven't lost money in the process. Unless of course you count the time spent putting these posts together; time is money, and time budgeting is essential, one could argue that the principal difference between people with money and people without (assuming equal talent and upbringing) is their ability to budget time.

And I expect "discovery", if it's ever going to happen, is going to take time, given all the competition, and I can only hope that Bloggerparty is itself noisy enough to make itself heard on my/our behalf; I'm told by one who kens that "it's known in the community".

So I keep posting, to see what I can see (and not for "Party Points").

- O Ceallaigh