The Awl

A Friendly Chat, with Logan Sachon: Chris Andino, Our Man in Libya

Logan Sachon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:05:16 +0000

I met Chris Andino my first semester at the University of Virginia. He was the managing editor of the weekly humor and news magazine, and I was a first-year staffer. Dino, as they called him, was one of a group of guys on staff who were super smart and incredibly funny and quick in a way that I had never encountered before. They made jokes about the characters on C-SPAN. I was scared of them. My first year was Dino's last, and after UVA he moved on to DC and the Foreign Service. After a two-year stint in Bogota, Columbia, he is currently serving in Tripoli, Libya. We spoke in the late summer; it was late morning in Libya and 2 a.m. in Portland. Attempts to follow-up, get a little background info, some pictures maybe, to try to get him to say something funny about Qadhafi, whatever, were thwarted, because: the Lockerbie bomber was released, there was an African Union summit, it was the 40th anniversary of Qadhafi in power, he had a human rights report deadline, and then there was that whole G20 thing.

THE AWL: One of the articles you wrote in college, you said you could kill a cow and you could drive a bus, so at the very least, you'd always be fed and working. I remember that sometimes and think: I have no skills.

ANDINO: I was a bus driver in college, and I was also sorting trash for recycling. So those were my career experiences. My final major was international relations with a specialty in Latin America. But growing up in Iowa, I never would have thought of the Foreign Service. My professors had been diplomats, and at UVA you also have a lot of kids with parents who were diplomats, because DC is so close and that's where they are. So that's where the idea was put in my head. I took the test [the Foreign Service Exam] while I was still in college, and it took awhile to get hired because you had to go through the clearances and stuff. Actually at the same time that I was applying to the Foreign Service, I was also going through the application process to be a bus driver for DC Metro. Applying to the Foreign Service is a long, drawn out process; but they got back to me before Metro, which says something about DC.

THE AWL: So what exactly does a foreign service officer do?

ANDINO: There are five tracks, but we can all do any of them. We're hired to be generalists. There's a political track, you do the traditional representational things, talk about bilateral relationships, the other component is that you're like a reporter, you talk to people, figure out what's going on and then you write about it. So having some journalistic experience is really helpful. Another track is economic, which is like political but with more emphasis on economic policy. Consulate is visas and passports. Management, one of the hardest jobs, they make sure the embassies are up and running, and then there's public diplomacy, which does a lot things to make us look good, like coordinating scholarships for people to come study in the US. I could do any one of those jobs, and I could do them anywhere in the world. But my track is political, though I did two years of consulate in Columbia, and that was totally fascinating.

THE AWL: But that might change?

ANDINO: Every two years you get a new job. For me, slightly ADD, this is great. I can choose a new country and a new function. I'm picking my next assignment now. You have input on where you go. It's like a normal job hunt. They have a list of available positions and you apply. It's kind of like fraternity bid week or something, not that I'd know much about that, but it's similar: you try them on, they try you on, and you see if it's a good fit. There are more jobs than there are people so you'll always find something, but we'll always be understaffed some place.

THE AWL: So you got in right after school.

ANDINO: One of the weirdest things for me being a diplomat is that it's a grown up job. I'm 29 years old, I've been doing this for 5 years, I'm getting to the mid level. In my next job I might be in charge of other diplomats. I've been married for 5 years. We might have kids. All these things are atypical for people our age. I lucked out and found out what I wanted to do really early. But I still act like I did in college. I have fun. We have people over and play Rock Band: a quintessentially 29-year-old thing to do. We were in Bogota before, and we would have parties all the time, these great parties with Senators and college kids and everyone. One end of the house would be a kid doing a keg stand and at the other end you're talking to a Senator. It was incredible, and then you go back to the US and no, that doesn't work anymore.

THE AWL: You speak Arabic.

ANDINO: For a year my only job assignment was to study Arabic, so I went to class 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, and that only got me to half the level that I would need. By comparison the same level of Spanish takes 6 months. And that's just to learn Koranic Arabic, and then you need the dialects, which are different in each country.

THE AWL: Do you hang out with Libyans at all?

ANDINO: We're just beginning our relationship with Libya. Libyans are very fascinating people and ordinary Libyans are really interested in what's going on with the US. And one of the best ways to get a feel for the people is to ride in a taxi. We spend so much of our time talking to the elite, it's really important to get out there with regular people, and here in Libya, you're often the first American they've ever met. And they can't believe it! "French?" "No, Amercican." "America! I love America!" They love America! "What do you love about America?" "The movies." They love gangster movies and kung fu movies and they associate that with the US. Well, okay, we'll take it.

THE AWL: So what if one of these cab drivers wants to talk politics. Is it the party line all the time?

ANDINO: There's not a line. One of the things we are hired for is our judgment; that's the primary thing we are hired for. What they're looking for is quick thinking, being able to distill information and pass things along at your discretion. I am an employee of the executive branch. So you don't swear an oath to the administration, you swear an oath to the Constitution. I think that it's really important that we have a skilled foreign service that is nonpolitical so that there is a core group of people that stays there from administration to administration. I give a lot of credit to the people who have been doing this for several administrations. The policies change, but the main goal stays the same.

You also learn to pick your battles. If you take a stand on every issue that you disagree with, it loses its meaning and power. You just have to trust that it's your job to implement policy, that the people who are making the decisions know a heck of a lot more than I do. If everyone who disagreed with the war in Iraq had quit, we would be so much worse off.

THE AWL: So we met on the staff at the alternative paper at UVA. I'd say it was a pretty "damn the man" culture. And now you, arguably, are the man, or at least you're working for him.

ANDINO: If I'm the man, there should be much better benefits. No, I'm not the man. There are people like that, damn the man people, in government, too. It turns out I'm pretty patriotic. And I didn't know that until I started doing this job. I don't really want to join the Army, I still have those sentiments. Not that I could, because I am fat and lazy. But I do have enormous respect for these guys. They are all doing what they think is the best for the country.

I think there is a more of a ragamuffin sense of how I approach US relations abroad. So what I do to engage people is have them over for drinks at my house. We play darts. We play Rock Band. Which is not a traditional strategy.

At the end of our day our job is to do this to make people's lives better in America. If that's your mission statement, it becomes really easy to do your job. Yeah, I put on a suit everyday and I brief four star generals and I talk to heads of state and that's also really cool-I don't stop being a tourist, I just met Qadafi, fantastic. People are going to be buying me drinks for the rest of my life because I have so many cool stories to tell. There was just a meeting of the AU here, and I looked around the room and it was like, damn, like a third of the heads of state in the world are here, in this room. I don't know that that will ever get old.

THE AWL: You're married. Is your wife with you in Libya?

ANDINO: Yes, she is here. The state department is good and getting better about employment opportunities for family members, and she works at the embassy. They just instituted new rules for MOH-Members of Household, because if it doesn't have a TAL-Three Letter Acryonym-it doesn't exist. The new rules allow better benefits for non-married officers and their partners. Everything has to go through Congress, and it takes awhile, but they are doing the right things.

THE AWL: How many of you are out there in Libya?

ANDINO: There's like 20 to 30 diplomats here?

THE AWL: And is that basically your social circle?

ANDINO: We have friends in the embassy and outside the embassy as well. The expat community is two groups: diplomats and people who are here to start commercial opportunities, mostly stuff with oil. We hang out with a really international group, which has been awesome for traveling. By the time I'm out of the service we'll have friends in every country. We got to spend time at a friend's house in Costa Rica, we were just with friends in London.

THE AWL: One of my favorite things to do when I'm traveling is check out the grocery stores. What are they like in Libya?

ANDINO: There is an entire aisle of canned tuna. Floor to ceiling canned tuna. It's a city of 2 million people, and there's only one or two things we'd consider a supermarket. Everything is imported, but we do have amazing dates. There's a separate green grocer, a separate butcher, sometimes there's a separate dairy place. Bakeries here are abundant and cheap; bread is subsidized. Gas is also cheap, 65 cents a gallon, subsidized. It's a cash-only society, there are few places that accept credit cards and very few banks, and then on top of that the highest denomination bill they have is like the equivalent of US $17. We recently booked tickets to London and I had to go to the travel agent's office to get the tickets and everyone is buying their tickets with cash. It's like a bank robber film, just mountains of cash.

THE AWL: What about booze?

ANDINO: There is booze on the black market, but prices are so astronomical that you don't participate in it. A ten dollar bottle of Absolut Vodka goes for $130 here. You find ways to get by. There isn't pork here, and there's not any good cheese. When we get out of town we are gluttons for bacon and beer. We were just in London and had about a hundred dollars worth of cheese with us in the hotel room. I think the housekeepers thought we were nuts. Next week is Ramadan and there will be no food. Nothing will be open during the day. Everyone becomes nocturnal, except for diplomats. We still work normal hours and bring our lunches because nothing is open. But we get to live in this amazing country, so: wah.

THE AWL: Had you traveled in the Muslim world before?

ANDINO: Coming to Libya was my first exposure to the Middle East, and it was one of my first choices. It's a fairly new embassy, so it's exciting to be here in the beginning of the relationship. Since being here I've taken short trips to Egypt. It's a very cool country, Egyptians are very nice, very keen on lots of tourism. The pyramids are one of the few things I've seen where pictures just really don't even come close. I've briefly been to Tunisia, to a synagogue that Al Qaeda bombed in 2002. Got to drive in the southern mountains, go off the map, speak Arabic, barter for pottery. We get to these really neat things just on our weekends. We want to go to Turkey. Dubai. One of the things I would love to do is the Haaj, just from cultural standpoint, but there isn't really a way to do that without being totally culturally insensitive.

THE AWL: You said you got to more or less pick your assignments. But what about Iraq? Could you be made to go there?

ANDINO: There's always the outside chance that you could be made to go anywhere. But so far all the Iraq diplomats have been volunteers. I have friends in Afghanistan who have been shot at, I have friends who have been kidnapped, but gotten away. There are diplomats that have died in Iraq. We aren't in the line of fire like the military, but it's still Iraq. It's gotten better apparently. But you have a fairly decent salary, you don't get rich in the foreign service for sure, but if you've served in the Middle East, there's a benefit package for what is a difficult year, and then you get a leg up on choosing your next assignment. It's unlikely that I'll go to Iraq next year. I have lots of friends that have done it, and I want to feel like I should be doing it, but you want to make sure your motivations are right, that you're doing it for the right reasons.

As cheesy as it sounds, it's really a humbling experience to be in the foreign service. You walk in the first day-and basically every day after that-and you're like, "I'm the dumbest person in this entire room." I had very little international experience before joining. My class had a PhD who spoke seven languages; I barely spoke Spanish. There was someone who had lived abroad for 30 years; I had been out of the country a week and half. That's a hard thing, to check your ego. To admit that yeah, I am the dumbest person in this room.

When I was doing visa work in Columbia, I was making hundreds of decisions everyday about who would get to come to the US on tourist visas, and it was an honor, but also very humbling, very hard. Over 99% of the people that applied really just want to come to see their family, or go on vacation, but there are also people who want to come to work, and then of course there are also terrorists and drug traffickers coming out of Columbia, and I have to use my judgment and training to make sure the right people get in and stay out.

THE AWL: How do you keep up with what's going on in America?

ANDINO: We are required to spend a month in the States every two years for that very reason, so that we don't get so distanced from the place and the culture we're representing. While on assignment I get Netflix. It's slow, but once a month I get my Netflix movies. I'm about four years behind pop culture in the US.

THE AWL: What about blogzzzzzzz?

ANDINO: I love music, so I read a lot of music blogs, I'm on Take Away Shows and Daytrotter and Pitchfork-indie rock stuff; I don't know anything about Beyonce. I don't want to tell you how much money I spend on iTunes. We get a certain amount of bandwidth a month, and I pretty much spend all of mine downloading episodes of Lost.

I read five or six international newspapers a day in the course of my job, and I do that through Google Reader. The "J" key on my keyboard is worn out from scrolling through headlines. Having lived in Washington for so long I'm a Washington Post junkie, not so much the New York Times. I do Google News Alerts for Libya and Columbia, since I have friends there still.

Personal blogs I'm less into. I mean, don't get me wrong, I had a blog in 2002 that I had for awhile, and now I run a small blog that has a really tiny readership of foreign service people, it's just like, you can get this benefit and that benefit. I think part of it is that it's an echo chamber now, everyone commenting on the same things. There are some blogs about the Middle East I read, FT.com has some foreign policy blogs that I read, Mark Lynch used to blog as Abu Aardvark and now he's over at Foreign Policy. I don't always agree with them and sometimes we have different perspectives, but it's good to get that viewpoint, so I read that. I read Geekery; I read Lifehacker before it started being about keep a clean desk and organizing your folders. DCist I still read to keep track of what's going on in DC.

THE AWL: And social networking sites?

ANDINO: I had a Twitter account for like three years but right now there just isn't much that I want to share with absolutely everybody. Like if my wife got pregnant, no, I would not put that on Twitter. I do use Facebook. UVA was one of the first schools that got it, and you put your profile together when you were 22 and in college and everyone else who was on it was also in college, and they already knew everything about you, so it was fine. They knew about the picture of you passed out drunk on the couch because they were the ones that took it! For the longest time my profile picture was from the Dec, a staged photo of me streaking the Lawn, high-fiving Ray. It was literally being caught with your pants down when the site was opened to the world.

But it's good for the Foreign Service, it's good for diplomacy. Everyone is on it. I have groups: these people are my friends and they know it all, they can see it all, these people are work people and can see a little less, they might be scandalized that I list the New Pornographers as a favorite band, but I can explain the band name to them, that's cool, and then this group, I don't even want to have that conversation.

I'm at a point in my life when I only talk to my very best friends like once every six months, so that's what Facebook is good for. It is how I keep in touch with people, because I don't have time to really keep in touch with everyone.

One of the things I'm excited to be a part of is revamping the websites. Why can't I Google the IRS website? Why can't I just tag something? There are things to us that just make sense, because we've grown up with it, and I think we're going to change the way things are run. The youngest members of Congress are our age. When McCain was here his communications director was my age and his staffers were my age. And it's like, yeah, when we take things over, when it's our turn, it's going to be okay, it's going to be good.

But you do miss things. I know that "Yes We Can" means a lot to so many people, but I wasn't there, I missed that moment. The BBC doesn't tell me how it feels to be in New York on election night. The American internet is a collection of media, but with the bandwith here, we miss out on some things. Americans have a shared experience and I think we forget that. I go home and people are talking about an SNL sketch, and I don't know what they're talking about. Like what's cool right now? What are people talking about? I don't even know.

THE AWL: Oh, I don't know that you're missing much. The third season of Mad Men just started. Teenage girls like vampires. That might be it.

ANDINO: I've seen the first episode of Mad Men. It just seemed sort of a glorification of misogyny, but I'm probably missing something. But you make certain sacrifices to do this job. I'm glad that I made those sacrifices.

Previously: Molly McAleer on Blogging, Auditioning, Videoing, Making It and Networking In Los Angeles

Logan Sachon is a writer in Portland (Oregon).

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A Friendly Chat: Molly McAleer on Blogging, Auditioning, Videoing, Making It and Networking In Los Angeles

Logan Sachon — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:30:14 +0000

Molly McAleer has about sixty million projects going right now, and one of them is going to lead to something that is going to make her rich and famous-famous, as opposed to Internet famous. Her current renown stems in some part from the irreverent and often bonkers videos she made for Defamer, as their employee in 2008. Her current projects include: her blog (Molls She Wrote), her Twitter (Molls), her web series (The Molls Show, produced by Justine Bateman's FM78.tv), a reality show she is pitching with friend Chuck McCarthy (Boy Meets Blogger), guest blogging stints (including gossip blog Evil Beet), PR work for one friend's makeup company (Marakele Minerals) and another friend's movie (Stuntmen)-and most recently, auditioning for TV commercials (spots she is particularly interested in: personal lubricants, tampons). She spoke to me on a Wednesday afternoon from her new, smaller apartment (across the hall from her old, larger apartment), in Koreatown, Los Angeles.

THE AWL: Hello! How are you doing this day?

MCALEER: I'm doing great! I just got an email saying that they want me to go in for a 4 o'clock audition today and I'm freaking out. I don't know if I can do it!

THE AWL: You want to reschedule?

MCALEER: No. Let's do this, they gave me no notice, and I have to write all afternoon anyway for this gossip website I fill in at. So let's just do this first and then I'll tackle the rest of it.

THE AWL: And this is the commercial agency?

MCALEER: Exactly. I just signed with them on Monday, but they know I have to pay my bills in other ways. I'm totally available but just not today. I really hope I don't piss off these people because it's a new contact, but I really cannot burn the bridges I have with people that are paying my bills.

THE AWL: What website are you blogging at today?

MCALEER: Today I'm doing something for Evil Beet. It's a gossip website. I do every other weekend there, and every now and then I do occasional fill-in days, because the woman who runs the site is a mom, with kids and stuff, and I just have a Chihuahua.

THE AWL: How do you structure your days?

MCALEER: I start with whatever meetings I have that day. So if I have to shoot photos with my friends or do a video with Chuck or go to VH1 and pitch, I base my day around that meeting. So I wake up between 7 in the morning and 10 and sometimes even noon, let's be real, and then I usually work until about 3 in the morning. So it's like nonstop. I try to take a break to eat lunch and have a cocktail. I always have my afternoon cocktail. I try and also go out every night, too. Networking is a huge part of living in L.A., and the more I go out, the more people I meet in the industry who might be able to hook me up or someone who I might want to work with.

THE AWL: It sounds really exhausting, but really fun.

MCALEER: It is exhausting. Every time I go home to Boston I'm just totally lame and my parents are like, do you have friends? Don't you still keep in touch with people from high school? And I'm like, well yeah, but I go out every night in LA, and it's a fulltime job to do everything that I do. I mean, I don't have a lot to show for it, but I feel like I put a lot of effort in.

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A Friendly Chat: Greg Karais, Yukon Enthusiast and Publisher of Four Profitable Magazines with Wily Business Models--and a 20-Hour Workweek

Logan Sachon — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:13:51 +0000

We had to google "Yukon." The GMC truck was the first hit, of course, and second, but the Canadian territory was third and it was in this illustrious page (Wikipedia) that I learned these very important facts: The Yukon was officially called the Yukon Territory until 2003 when it was changed to just the Yukon, by law. It is the most northern and western territory in Canada and borders the following things: British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Alaska, the Beaufort Sea. It has a flag, a seal, but no motto, and though it is very, very large, it is also very, very cold, and is home to just 34,000 people; the largest city, Whitehorse, has 20,000 of them, and the second largest, Dawson City, has 1500. Dawson City is where Greg Karais started his first publication at age 23. Today he is 38, and publisher of four profitable magazines about the Yukon.

Three of them are annuals: The Last Great Road Trip is a tourist magazine; its German-language counterpart is the in-flight magazine for Condor flights from Frankfurt to Whitehorse; and ArtsNet Yukon focuses on arts and cultural events in the territory. The flagship publication of Harper Street, Greg's company, is Yukon, North of Ordinary, a quarterly magazine which is also the in-flight magazine for Air North. We spoke to Greg by phone at his home office, which is in his house, on a hill, overlooking a lake, many mountains, and quite possibly, Alaska.

THE AWL: Tell me about how you got into publishing.

GREG KARAIS: Oh that's going way back. I was living in Dawson City. I got there about 1991 or so. I put an annual out, and that then morphed into a weekly after about 2 or 3 years.

THE AWL: Why publishing? Was this to make money?

GREG KARAIS: As a kid I always had newspaper routes at one time three and I always won the awards for selling the most subscriptions when there was a decent prize to be won. Aside from that I had no money-so I was able to sell ads to pay for the printing.

THE AWL: And what was the content?

GREG KARAIS: It was mostly history, but unfortunately history doesn't pay the bills, so it became advertorials, which we used to subsidize all the good stories.

THE AWL: So were you just winging it, and figuring out how to make money on these publications? Or was there something you were basing it on?

GREG KARAIS: It was based on stubbornness. I was just really stubborn. I was pretty young, I was 23 when I started. I had no business experience, no advertising experience, no experience in publishing. But I was just looking for sales. It was really small potatoes at first; I think I sold $3000 in ads the first month, and then more the next.

THE AWL: Did you have funding?

GREG KARAIS: My tip money funded it.

THE AWL: When were you able to quit being a waiter and focus on the publications?

GREG KARAIS: I was about 28, so ten years ago.

THE AWL: And were you doing the editorial, too?

GREG KARAIS: I always had someone else do editorial. I can write a mean check and that's about it.

THE AWL: So you started with this annual in Dawson, and now you have four publications, including two seatback magazines. How did that happen?

GREG KARAIS: The Last Great Roadtrip was the first one. I put a proposal in with Condor, saying that we would like to produce an in-flight magazine for the summer season for them. They accepted it under the guise that I would pay to put the magazine on the flights, plus I would pay freight to get them to them. And I based it on ad sales. The magazine is free to Condor, they didn't make any payment or anything like that. They charge me a fee per magazine to put it on the flights. And that's not unheard of; that's pretty common I think. And after that they don't want anything. And I was able to take those seatbacks, those eyeballs, and sell that. And that's what people want, those eyeballs.

THE AWL: Tell me about Yukon, North of Ordinary.

GREG KARAIS: Yukon, North of Ordinary was based as an in-flight magazine. So what we did, the first two years, we put a lot of locals in the magazine, to build loyalty with the locals. And there is also a huge loyalty to Air North, because they broke Canadian Air, or Air Canada's prices. Air Canada used to have outrageous prices, and with Air North, the fares got a lot cheaper. So there's a lot of loyalty to them. So we put a lot of people in the magazine, so people would go, oh I know that person. It literally feels like everybody in the Yukon knows someone that's been in the magazine. So loyalty was the first thing, but now we're gearing it more towards more of a national audience. Someone picking up the magazine in the bookshop doesn't care about a local person, it might be interesting here, but it's not really outside.

THE AWL: And how did you get involved with Air North? Did you approach them?

GREG KARAIS: I approached the airline about it. I knew when I got the Condor deal, I knew it opened a hallway with a bunch of door handles in it, it was just a matter of shaking the door handles and eventually one of those doors would open. I think it took about a year and a half of badgering them and making it happen before we actually got permission to put the magazines on the planes. I know they had many, many proposals coming in, but the key for us, everybody wanted to sell them a magazine, whereas I wanted to give them a magazine. So we print two covers. One has our UPC code on it, and the other one has the Air North logo on it, so it is branded for their flights. And they also get six pages in every magazine. So they get a percentage of the magazine, and they get to the vet the magazine. But there's a trust there now, they don't pay too much attention. It's nice. It's friendly. I'm not looking to create controversy.

THE AWL: So there are no battles between your editor and Air North at all?

GREG KARAIS: No, no. No battle. We get along really well actually. We submit our story ideas, and they say, yeah, that works for us. They just like to make sure we don't have stories about plane crashes, or things that would upset people. In this market, I don't think this magazine would be able to exist without the airline. The business people, the ones who are buying ads, they know there are thousands of people a year with that magazine in front of them for hours on the flights.

THE AWL: How does it compare to your relationship with Condor?

GREG KARAIS: Condor doesn't seem to care. They seem to be so big that they don't care what we do. They just want a paycheck. The airlines are really competitive. They are looking for revenue.

THE AWL: And these magazines are profitable.

GREG KARAIS: Yes. We are doing pretty well. We have just under a thousand subscribers to North of Ordinary, so that doesn't represent in much dollars. It's ad sales, I would say 95% of my business is ad sales.

THE AWL: And the rest of your distribution, how does that work?

GREG KARAIS: There's a company in Montreal called Presse Commerce, and I ship them 8000 magazines or so, and they ship them across Canada, to doctor's offices, lawyers offices. And that's been really good for subscriptions. They charge, I think, like quarter per magazine that goes out. And we have a deal with the Department of Tourism and Culture and they take 5000 magazines and when people request information on the Yukon, they include a copy of the magazine.

THE AWL: So to have a profitable magazine right now: that's pretty special.

GREG KARAIS: My ad sales are going up. Partially it's because of where we are. It seems like there's a lot of doom and gloom down south, but I think the small magazines are doing well, or at least holding their own. For the last issue of The Last Great Road Trip, I thought my sales were going to go down, so I cut the pages back, and in the end my sales were up a quarter of one percent, plus I saved on freight, so that ended up being really good for me. Sales are going up for three of my four publications.

THE AWL: So how is this possible-is the economy not messed up there?

GREG KARAIS: The economy here seems to be holding its own. I think we always hit the cycle about two years after. There are a lot of federal dollars up here just to keep the Yukon open, for mineral exploration and so on. Lots of people with federal jobs, which help out small business owners.

THE AWL: Who advertises in your magazine?

GREG KARAIS: There are a few anchors, but it is a lot of smaller guys, a lot of quarter pages. And those quarter pages seem to pay the bills.

THE AWL: And you do the ad sales?

GREG KARAIS: Yeah. I've had help in the past, but that's really expensive, so I've had to the cut them out. We don't have a large staff staff, and the workers comp, and the unemployment to pay, and the pensions. Being small, we can move a lot quicker. If sales go low, we can cut more pages.

THE AWL: How long did it take you to become profitable?

GREG KARAIS: North of Ordinary made money from the first day, when it came out in February 07.

THE AWL: And the others?

GREG KARAIS: Bookkeeping was the curse of my life for so long. I'd say it took about 7 years before I was making money on it. What's happened with the North of Ordinary is that I've been able to hire a fulltime editor, fulltime designer, so it all fits together now. Since North of Ordinary has been around, everything else has become a lot more profitable. Everything is spread out over more dollars. The editor is responsible for some stuff, but everything else is contracted out. Elaine Corden is fulltime, there's a separate editor for the German publication, but Elaine is responsible for the other ones. Our new editor has a great sense of humor. Most magazines lack humor, and everyone just wants to laugh, so we're trying to put more humor in the magazine.

THE AWL: You have PDFs online of your magazine. That seems unique.

GREG KARAIS: Is it? I didn't know. I just want people to read the magazine. My job is the sell the Yukon, get people up here so people can make a living.

THE AWL: Tell me more about the Yukon. I had to Google it.

GREG KARAIS: You need to come up! You need to visit. We'll set you up with a place to stay. From your front door [in Portland] it takes about 40 hours to drive, pretty much nonstop. On average there's about 11 square miles per person. White Horse is the main city, there's 24,000 people there. It's the most beautiful place in the world. There's no one here. From our windows we can see lakes. People don't know about it, they just think it's cold. Yeah, it's cold, but the summers are beautiful, the daylight is incredible. No one expects you stay the whole winter. Everyone goes away. Last winter we went to Paris and then flew to London and backpacked around Portugal with our 4-year-old and year-and-a-half old for six weeks. I would never get into a weekly again, or monthly.

THE AWL: So is winter in the Yukon like August in Europe, everything shuts down and people leave?

GREG KARAIS: In Dawson City even the coffee shops close. Over Christmas there's just one hotel open; they take turns shutting down. You could fire a cannon down the main street and not hit anyone. The coldest I've ever seen in there is -56. That is cold. -30 is comfortable. -35 is bleak, and anything after that starts to hurt. Literally like if you started your car and started to drive you'd just hear thump, thump, thump, from where they are square and sitting on the ground. I don't know if I'm going to die here, but I'll spend the rest of my good years here, for sure. The winters are harder for older people. But the quality of life here is very rich. We don't have traffic like you have down there, the I-5.

THE AWL: How'd you end up there?

GREG KARAIS: I was going to go to college for business management and I was doing course work right out of high school and I was thinking, this is stupid. So I cashed in my tuition money and bought a ticket to Calgary and I worked there for a while and I ended up getting fired, and I went for a bike ride the day after I got fired for about 1200 kilometers, then went up to Vancouver Island and took the Alaska Marine Highway to Skagway then cycled into Whitehorse. I hated the Yukon, went to a horrible place called Beaver Creek. So I left, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I came back, this time to Dawson City. And now 17 years later I'm grey and bald and getting fat.

THE AWL: Do you have plans for more publications?

GREG KARAIS: I'm all about quality of life right now. My kids are young; I only get one shot with them. And without exaggerating, I bet I don't work more than 20 hours a week. I'm 38 years old and I paid the price before, I was working 70 and 80 hours a week before when I was making no money and blah blah blah, I don't want to go back to that. My only niece died in a car accident, and it was a big wake up call. Life is short, tenuous, and fragile, and I don't want to work my life away.

THE AWL: So what did you do this weekend?

GREG KARAIS: My in-laws were in town, we worked on the boat. I've been working on the house. We just got a couple of donkeys. They are amazing creatures, I never grew up around livestock like that. But our daughter is not even two years old and she just walks up under their bellies and stands there and will pick up a piece of straw and they'll stop what they're doing to eat that little piece of straw. We are on 65 acres, on a mountainside and we have bears here, and so that's one of the reasons we have them, for bear controls. I trust my kids' lives with these animals. They'll scare the bears away. They are funny characters. They are like 500 pound dogs.

THE AWL: Where are you in relation to Alaska?

GREG KARAIS: I can probably see Alaska from my window.

THE AWL: Can you see Russia from your window?

GREG KARAIS: My God, thank God she resigned. What a horrible, horrible person. What a disgrace to America. Thank God Obama got in. No, I don't think I can see Russia from my window. But I'm probably about 60 miles from the Alaska border. We're going there in a couple days. I spend a fair amount of time in Alaska.

THE AWL: What's it like? My main Alaska education comes reading profiles of Sarah Palin.

GREG KARAIS: Well, there is a bit of that there. Billboards proclaiming Matthew 10:21, or whatever, I don't get it. There's a lot of Christians up there, a lot of military up there. It's fairly transient as well. I find Alaskans to be incredibly generous, friendly, helpful, outgoing.

THE AWL: If you live in the middle of nowhere how do you get the internet?

GREG KARAIS: This place is incredible. It's DSL here. We called the phone company and they were here in two days. The federal government had a program across Canada, they felt that the internet would put places on more of a level footing, so there was a big push to get the Internet across Canada and the Yukon certainly benefited for that.

THE AWL: What do you want people to know about the Yukon?

GREG KARAIS: I think there's a total misunderstanding of what's up here. I think people think we're kind of backwater up here, kind of hillbillyish. It's well-educated up here, nice clothes, good cars. It's completely misunderstood. People think cold weather is bad, but we can drive in the winter here. The humidity of southern Ontario or Lake Michigan is far worse than the winters here. A hundred steps down my driveway, and this is obviously not everywhere here, but I have a hundred-mile view in either direction. If you go hiking, you feel like you're the first person that's ever been somewhere.

Previously: Michael K., Web Entrepreneur, Blogger, Pottymouth

Logan Sachon is a writer in Portland (Oregon).

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A Friendly Chat: Michael K, Web Entrepreneur, Blogger, Pottymouth

Logan Sachon — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:50:09 +0000

Michael K runs and writes the website Dlisted, which gives a rundown on the day's celebrity comings and goings with crude humor that often verges on the vulgar (though he disputes this point). Our 3 p.m. conversation took place between a post that featured some pap photos of A-ha! singer Morten Hackett ("For being almost a half-a-century old, dude is....still doing things to me. Take on my no-no, Morten!") and one that questioned the authenticity of Soulja Boy's Twittered pic of his groin ("Is that a bottle of Strawberry Suave in your boxers?"). Michael K lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side with a roommate and a chihuahua named Elvie (he admitted the breed with sigh: "it's such a gay man's dog," he said).

THE AWL: You were apartment hunting recently. How did that work out?

MICHAEL K: Oh, it didn't really. I'm really picky, and I don't know why, because it's New York. I've lived here six years, and I'm still looking for the perfect apartment even though it doesn't exist unless you're a zillionaire.

THE AWL: What's your work day like?

MICHAEL K: I roll out of bed and get on the computer, and then at night I roll off the computer and go to bed. I don't shower until like 7 at night, and I usually don't eat until later either. I leave the house in the morning to walk my dog and then am just in front the computer all day.

THE AWL: So what time does this start?

MICHAEL K: I get up at like 7:30, which is like really early for me. I've never been a morning person. When I had an office job I would start work at 10 and get up at 9:30 and roll out. I hate getting up that early, but I have to start picking stuff out for the day. It's really hard to be interested in that stuff at 7:30 am, hard to be funny. Usually the night before I try to get a couple of things going in my head so I'm not totally brain dead in the morning. I usually just start writing first thing when I get up, which is like, painful.

THE AWL: So you're literally just in front of your computer all day.

MICHAEL K: I watch TV, I'm at the computer, I try to multitask, but it's hard to watch TV and work at the same time. I'm just stuck to the computer, and if I have to take a break I'll watch TV. I'm sure I have cancer or whatever you get from being in front of the computer too much.

THE AWL: Are you writing in character?

MICHAEL K: No, it's totally me. Sometimes it's an exaggeration of me, but it's me. I'm not creating a character. There's not two different people.

THE AWL: Can we talk about vulgarity? Your site is pretty vulgar.

MICHAEL K: It used to be worse! It used to be so much worse. I think because I've gotten a little bigger I've tamed it a little bit, but in real life I'm a lot worse. But I don't think it's that vulgar! I've always been around that, that's how my friends and I talk. I talk like that around my mom, just because I like to shock her, so I think I get worse and worse to shock her, and she's like oh my gosh Michael, don't say that. But I think it's kind of tame. What I think is vulgar isn't like sex or anything like, but sites with exploding brains and stuff, people send me this stuff for Caption This! pictures. I can't remember the site name, I used to link to it all the time. But that's vulgar and gross to me: exploding assholes, exploding brains. And Christian sites are vulgar to me, too.

THE AWL: You started the site for fun. Now it's your job. Is it still fun?

MICHAEL K: Mostly it's fun, but it's become a job, so it's like with any job: "I don't want to look at pictures of Jon Gosling again, I don't even want to know he exists today." But when I get into it it's really fun, people send me things, and it's fun, but there are days when it's like, "God, I don't want to even think of these people."

THE AWL: Do you just hammer the posts out and throw them up or is there an editing process?

MICHAEL K: It's so obvious I don't edit them! My mistakes are so bad. I don't really edit. I write it once, and then I go back and read it a couple times to make sure it's somewhat legible, and then I'll go with it. I don't change a lot of things. I want it to be first instincts, whether it's funny or it's not, just first thoughts.

THE AWL: Do you feel a kinship with other bloggers, that you're part of a bigger community? Or does it really feel like just you and your site.

MICHAEL K: It isn't as lonely as it sounds, I talk to other bloggers all day, to readers all day. It's not completely lonely.

THE AWL: Do you ever meet your readers?

MICHAEL K: When I started I'd meet people all the time, they'd be like, oh let's go for a drink. Now I don't do that as often. It's still kind of weird. It's like a blind date. And now it's so much pressure. So I do it, but I kind of have to be liquored up before I do it.

THE AWL: How did you end up in New York?

MICHAEL K: I'm from L.A. I always wanted to live in New York, ever since I was a kid. I knew I would like it. I visited a few times, and I lived in Florida for a little bit, but that was just awful. So I just moved here.

THE AWL: After school?

MICHAEL K: Yeah, after college, in L.A., in Orange County.

THE AWL: What did you think you'd end up doing?

MICHAEL K: I never really knew, honestly. I thought like, oh, maybe I'll be a writer. It always changed. I'd watch a movie about fashion design and think, oh maybe I'll be a fashion designer. I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grow up. And I still don't. I don't see blogging as a real job. And people don't either, people are like, oh when are you going to get a real job? It's like, good question. It just doesn't seem like a real job. I think because it's still fun, and I feel like I'm just messing around.

THE AWL: I read that you've been able to live off the blog for awhile.

MICHAEL K: I've been living off of it for a couple of years, which is crazy to me, I didn't think I'd make one cent, it wasn't about that. It's still crazy. I got advertising probably the year after I started, and when I started selling ads, it was like, okay, we'll see. I never thought I could be making a living until I started making a same amount that I made at my job.

THE AWL: Is it a lot of work to run the site?

MICHAEL K: Blogads does all my ads. I have a programmer, but not fulltime. Updating it is just the most work.

THE AWL: And what were you doing when you started the site?

MICHAEL K: I worked for a gay website for dudes to find sex with each other, and no I didn't jerk off on webcams or anything like that. I did the administrative stuff. When I started the blog I would do some at work, some at home, some on the weekends. They knew and were totally fine with it, which was good.

THE AWL: How much longer do you see yourself doing this?

MICHAEL K: I don't know. I just take it day by day, I don't put a time limit on it. I don't know if it's still cute if I'm talking about assholes when I'm 40 years old. There's definitely a time limit on it just because it's so time consuming, it takes your whole life. I can't go on vacation, I can't have a day off. There will come a time and it's going to be a sad day for me. It'll be a like a chicken without its head for me.

THE AWL: Have you ever had guest bloggers so you could take a break?

MICHAEL K: A couple years ago I decided to go on vacation and I had some guests post, and it was a disaster. I came back and I had so many emails that were like, don't ever leave again, they were total idiots, and the people who did it were like, don't ever ask me to do that again, those people are crazy. But I might have to do it again. It would be nice to have a Saturday.

THE AWL: Wait. You blog on the weekends?

MICHAEL K: Yeah. Seven days. I don't blog as much on the weekends, but I spend 3 or 4 hours on it on weekend days, yeah.

THE AWL: Are you actually into celebrities still?

MICHAEL K: I think it's unhealthy how obsessed I am. I have dreams about celebrities every night. Last night I had a dream about Lady Gaga, or Lady CaCa as I have been calling her. I think I've always been into it, TV, movies, celebrities. It's just the way I was born. I was always into gossip and talking shit. It's been the biggest part of me I think.

THE AWL: Is there anyone you won't write about?

MICHAEL K: I think the boundaries change each day. Some days I'm like, okay you're not going to make fun of children, and some days its like, you're not going to make fun of Michelle Williams because of the whole Heath Ledger thing. But then here are some stories you have to do whether or not you can make them funny. But there are some stories that if I can't find any humor in it, I don't touch it.

THE AWL: What do you think about reality TV "stars"?

MICHAEL K: I love them. I think it's because they are such an easy target. It's so easy to write about the Goslings, so easy to write about Heidi and Spencer. They have really no talent, so it's such an easy target. When it's easy it's fun. It's the gift that keeps on giving. They want to be famous so bad, it makes them so desperate, it's easy to slap them around a bit, and they love it because it gives them attention. People write me and are like, stop giving them attention! But they don't mean it. They love to slap them around, too.

THE AWL: Okay. So besides the reality kids, any other favorites to write about?

MICHAEL K: Britney was my favorite, favorite when she was a wreck. But then she got her shit together and washed her hair, since then there hasn't been anybody like that.

THE AWL: Not Lindsay Lohan?

MICHAEL K: Sometimes I see pictures of Lohan and it's just too sad, it's too easy. Then sometimes I'll read her Twitter, and it's like god, what is she doing. I'm kind of sick of her. I'd love to see more of her mom. But with Lindsay Lohan it's the same shit. She's no Amy Winehouse.

THE AWL: Speaking of. What happened to her?

MICHAEL K: She went to St. Lucia and became a drunk instead of a crackhead, and now she's back in England. She's such a mess, but she's so endearing for me. I just have a thing for crackheads, I like them. When everyone is standing on the street and it's quiet, a crackhead will always talk to me.

THE AWL: Do you mostly write sober or do you turn to substances for help?

MICHAEL K: I'm mostly sober. I think people can tell when I'm drunk because I have more mistakes then, usually.

THE AWL: What TV shows do you watch?

MICHAEL K: Oh my God what don't I watch. I watch it all. Well, all reality shows, not real TV. Everything on VH1. mostly reality shows. Reality crap. Big brother, I love that.

THE AWL: When you go out in the world and meet people, what do you say you do?

MICHAEL K: I just say I write things on the Internet, ha. Usually that's all I say, and that's fine, because that's what I do. Or I say I'm a blogger. I think mostly people understand, they know what a blogger is. My mother doesn't understand, but mostly people know.

THE AWL: Does your mom read the site?

MICHAEL K: My mom reads the site, she does. People are shocked by that, but that's how I am with her; she doesn't expect anything less. I talk to her everyday. I have a lot of friends that don't talk to their parents for months. I feel weird going a day. Maybe I haven't left the nest yet.

THE AWL: Do you have siblings?

MICHAEL K: Yeah, I have a younger sister who lives in Brooklyn. She's a kindergarten teacher.

THE AWL: Ha! Sorry, I don't know why that's funny.

MICHAEL K: Yeah, we're complete opposites, different sides of the planet. But I see her all the time. Our family is really close because it's just us three, my dad left when I was three. But she reads the site, too.

Logan Sachon is a writer in Portland (Oregon).

Previously: Michael Anthony Steele
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Michael Anthony Steele: Kids Screenwriter, Novelizationist, Ad Man

Logan Sachon — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:57:34 +0000

Michael Anthony Steele goes by Ant and is a freelance writer for kiddos. He started his writing career as a staff writer for Wishbone, the PBS series about a talking terrier, and as a freelancer has written 25 episodes of Barney and Friends, five videos for BOZ: The Green Bear Next Door (a preschool show about a green bear, next door), and some 60 licensed books based on popular kids' properties. Sometimes he is hired to write an original story starring an existing character, which he did for Shrek, and sometimes he is hired to turn an upcoming movie into a book, which he's done most recently for The Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. He also does some more random stuff, like a recent book he wrote for the Department of Public Works. Also, he had George Carlin propose to his wife via this answering machine message. He works out of his home office in Dallas.

The Awl: Were you always a writer?

Michael Anthony Steele: Yes I wrote mainly for myself, just some stories. It was what I wanted to do, but I ended up getting a degree in photography, because that was something else I enjoyed, if writing ever fell through. But yeah, ever since I was a little kid, I've just written here and there, no real books or full screenplays, but mainly just stories, things like that.

The Awl: How did you get started in children's entertainment?

Michael Anthony Steele: When I was going to school for photography, my roommate at the time was a good friend named Bob Trevino. He was in Dallas working with special effects, and whenever they needed a warm body, someone to lug some stuff or an extra pair of hands, I'd go and get paid for it. So by the time I graduated I was doing more work in the film business than photography. I'd also occasionally do art department stuff, set department, props. And someone recommended me for a job in the prop department at Wishbone, and I got a job as an assistant.

The Awl: And this was in Dallas?

Michael Anthony Steele: Yeah, the studio was in Plano, a suburb north of the city.

The Awl: Is there a big film and TV industry there?

Michael Anthony Steele: Yeah, it fluctuates. It was big for awhile: JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, those things were filmed here. And then it'll just be a lot of commercial and industrial stuff. The film industry outside of LA moves around. It went to Canada for awhile, and now a lot of is in Louisiana. Back when I started it was really busy in Dallas. And Barney filmed here, too.

The Awl: What made you think to write an episode of Wishbone? Were you reading the scripts there and thinking, oh, I can do this?

Michael Anthony Steele: That's exactly it. You work on a show for that long, and it was probably a good year that I was in the prop department on season one, 40 episodes. And you get to know pretty much everyone. And some of the writers were staff, some were outside writers, just like on any show. I had made friends with the head writer and was feeding her my spec scripts, and that was at the end of that season, and the next season the producers found my scripts and hired me on as a spec writer.

The Awl: Was it harder than you thought at first?

Michael Anthony Steele: Storytelling not so much, with writing you learn a lot, and I'm still learning. Not just grammar things but format situations. Every TV series is different as far as what people like, little tweaks format-wise. And then some TV shows want more visible scripts, and some want more dialogue and want to let the director take care of the visuals. But all these things you don't know about: being out of the business, you stumble onto as you make your way. And the same with publishing; there are things you just figure out.

The Awl: What projects are you working on now?

Michael Anthony Steele: We just got back from vacation, my desk is pretty clear. But I just finished up a couple projects before I left. One is a kids book for the National Public Works Association, believe it or not. They actually kind of teach kids what public works is all about.

The Awl: So, what is public works all about?

Michael Anthony Steele: This one was about what public works does in a snowstorm, as far as plowing streets and laying down salt. Things kids may not know about. Busted water mains, downed power lines, school closings, all these kinds of things.

The Awl: How did you get this gig?

Michael Anthony Steele: Most of my work comes from word of mouth. People change jobs so often, and when they need a writer, they know me. This job came from a woman who used to work in the Wishbone publishing department. I do have some marketing through my site and all, but most of my work is word of mouth.

The Awl: How did you get into advertising?

Michael Anthony Steele: After Wishbone was over, I stayed on at the company and there was a lot of marketing and copy work for the Wishbone brand in general. So I did everything from print ads to audio announcements and in-store promotions, different copy for Happy Meal prizes or something like that, whatever came up. Steven Kavner, he was a producer on the second season of Wishbone, he stayed on too working on other things, so we got together doing that, and also working on some advertising for Barney. Steve started Salty Pretzels Entertainment, and we do a bunch of the advertising for kids properties. We kind of fell into it and were good at it, so we have fun with it.

The Awl: Do you feel like working on the ads uses a different part of your brain, or is it similar to writing?

Michael Anthony Steele: Kind of, but really it's all about how you format it, the rest isn't that different. You want to keep the end audience interested entertained no matter if it's to tell them something with an ad or just entertain them with a show. So you want to keep their attention, show them something new. That's what it all boils down to. Approach whatever problem or challenge or assignment you're given and try to come up with something that hasn't been seen or your take on it, try to come up with something new. It's the same approach whether it's an ad or a show. There's a lot more politics in advertising. In publishing you work with an editor, just you and him, or you and her.

The Awl: Pre Wishbone, would you have imagined you'd be so successful writing for children?

Michael Anthony Steele: I wouldn't have guessed for children. I've always wanted to be a writer, and I am working on some adult stuff, not adult, ha, but you know, for adults, science fiction, thriller sort of projects. So if I had chosen to be a kind of writer, that's the stuff I would have done. But I kind of fell into the children's entertainment world and found out I was good at it.

The Awl: What is it like to write for kids?

Michael Anthony Steele: I guess it's different for each age group. For example, one of the original Barney writers, Steve White, had a good piece of advice for writing for preschool kids and kids in general. He said, you can use all the vaudeville pratfalls and the oldest joke in the book on these kids because they've never seen it before, it's brand new to them and it's really funny to them. Stuff that we'd think was corny, and oh my gosh, that's such an old joke or that's such a bad joke, kids love it.

The Awl: Have you had to study child development so you know what's appropriate, or is that just something you've picked up?

Michael Anthony Steele: I mostly just picked it up. In the past I've worked with church kids groups and at the YMCA. I was the site director for day camp, and my wife is an art teacher at a school. So we don't have kids, but have a lot of experience working with kids, so really it's just something I've picked up. Certainly on Barney and Wishbone there are people that are there for the educational aspect of it, so we had those resources available. And I'm kind of young at heart, I'm a sci-fi and geeky action figure kind of guy anyway. I still play.

The Awl: When you're writing these TV shows, do you think about the adults that have to watch them with their kids?

Michael Anthony Steele: Yeah, sometimes, especially for Barney, because you know, Barney gets a bad rap. My advice to the adults is that it's not for them, it's for the kids, and the kids love it. It's not a bad thing to hear the theme song over and over again, it's a good song, it teaches manners, respect. The cool thing about the shows is that every now and then we did try to throw in jokes or references that the adults would get, that would go by the kids heads and make the adults chuckle. That's always fun to throw those in there. So we're aware of it. And I'm aware that a lot of the books I'm writing for the younger kids, their parents are reading them. So it's something I try to be aware of, but the main goal is to write for the kids.

The Awl: What is the Barney set like? I imagine it to be bonkers. I'm always interested in the adults that do silly entertainment, whether they really are kids at heart, or whether they're crude off camera.

Michael Anthony Steele: I wouldn't go as far as to say it's crude, but adults are adults, we make our own jokes. Certainly not when there's kid actors there. For Barney, I had a cameo on one episode and was visiting plenty, but I didn't spend nearly as much time there, because I'm writing in my little hole over here. But they're like a family, they're really close. It's not like wa-hoo! Barney fun all the time. But it's a business, you create the image for the camera, and when the camera is off, you have fun like everyone else.

The Awl: So at this point how does it work with Barney? Do they come to you with ideas? Or do you pitch them?

Michael Anthony Steele: Well they're on hiatus until next year, so there's nothing right now. But every show is different, and for each show, every season is different. On some seasons Barney has said, 'hey we have all these different topics, which one do you want," or, "hey, we have all these different topics, you're going to do this one, or, pitch us ideas." But each show is different. Barney has one head writer, but there's no staff writers right now, just a pool of freelance writers.

The Awl: So if one wanted to write for Barney, how would one do that?

Michael Anthony Steele: I don't know! I was very lucky. I've never had a pitch a spec script since then. But a lot of people do that.

The Awl: Was the dog totally brilliant on Wishbone?

Michael Anthony Steele: Oh yeah he was great. There's one main dog named Soccer who played Wishbone, and then there were two others that did tricks-and then there were stuffed dogs that did the more dangerous stuff.

The Awl: Were any dogs ever hurt in the making of this television program?

Michael Anthony Steele: No, no. We had an actor hurt once, but no dogs. An actor playing Don Quixote fell off his horse and cracked a couple of ribs, but as far as I know the dogs all stayed safe.

The Awl: What are the most fun projects for you? Or at this point is it all work?

Michael Anthony Steele: Well, they're all fun, it's always something I haven't done before, a different property, this novelization of the Night at the Museum, that was fun, and when I got the Batman books that was fun, because I'm a huge Batman fan. And it's always fun to get into the character. I didn't come up with GI Joe but I have to write for him, so you try to get into that world and be true to the characters and the world.

The Awl: I'm interested in the process for the novelizations. How did you prepare to write Shrek, or the Night at the Museum book?

Michael Anthony Steele: I get the script and I read through the script, get an idea what's going on, get it all plugged in my brain so I know what I can cut if I need to. You can never put a whole script in the junior novelizations, maybe the adult ones. So I put in all the dialogue, and then build it around that. I always get the script way before the movie's done filming, so the script will change a few more times and things will change on the set, and you may not know which actor is playing which role, so I'll scour the Internet and look for photos that have leaked from the set. For Night at the Museum I found some stuff that leaked on to YouTube when they were filming, so that was good, to see the uniform, the costumes. You want to know is it a fat guy or a skinny guy or blond hair or red hair, what the uniforms might look like. So much changes from the script to the movie, so if you find something that you know is going to be the exact same as the movie, you want to be able to use it.

Usually just when I'm almost done is when you get close to the end of the production and there will be more stuff leaked and IMDb will have the cast or the rumored cast up there. There are so many people going into making the movie, the writer writes the script but the production designer might have a whole different view. With Speed Racer, I just wanted to make sure I got as much right, and they were really tight with security, there was nothing leaking. I got the cast list, then a couple things that changed that I wish I'd known about earlier.

The Shrek projects was writing original stories. I did a lot of research on that, too, just immersed myself in everything that had been done for them so far. It was just before the second movie came out. There was a Universal ride, a 3D experience that was just released on DVD, so I had the first movie, the second movie in theaters, and you could buy this bonus 3D short that ties in with the first movie. So just to hear the characters in your head, wrap your brain around it. It's kind of zen-like. It's like a impressionist watching a movie star so he can get the best impression.

The Awl: After you've written these novelizations, do you feel some sort of ownership over the characters, the story?

Michael Anthony Steele: Yeah, you do get a little defensive about it, root for the movies to do better. With Speed Racer I really enjoyed the script and was kind of disappointed when the movie didn't do as well as you hoped. The script for the Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, which I did the children's book for, it was one of the best scripts I've ever read, but it just didn't do as well as I hoped. There were some things in the script that were cut out for whatever reasons.

I'm kind of jaded going in watching these movies, I know how it is, for one, and I've seen how the sausage is made, so to speak. I've seen the process. You miss some things, are totally surprised by things. I don't get to fully enjoy the movie like an audience member going in without knowing anything would.

The Awl: Do you think there will be a time when you'll move on from kids writing?

Michael Anthony Steele: Some projects I have are totally not for kids. A lot of people do the opposite of what I'm doing, authors or screenwriters who will make horrors or thrillers or sci fi and then they'll have kids and want to do something for their kids. I'm now working on the more adult stuff.

The Awl: I saw on your website that you're doing a project called Clown Commandos. It's kind of creepy! Is it for kids or adults?

Michael Anthony Steele: It's a little for both: Justice League meets GI Joe meets Ninja Turtles sort of thing. I do some speaking engagements at elementary schools and I've shown the first episode there and the kids all loved it. A little bit of test marketing. So it can go either way, like GI Joe has comics for older kids and cartoons for younger kids and then they'll be a movie for the adults.

The Awl: How did that come about?

Michael Anthony Steele: It was kind of a weird thing, my partner, Scott McFadden, had kind of had a fear of clowns, and I don't know what sparked it originally. It kind of evolved from that. Not really as a therapeutic sort of thing, but clowns came up in conversation a lot. It started as Mortal Clownbat, and evolved from that. We're just doing it for ourselves, to tell our own story, have fun. Whatever happens, happens.

Logan Sachon is a writer in Portland (Oregon).

Previously: Stephen J. Cannell.
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A Friendly Chat: Stephen J. Cannell, Novelist, Co-Creator of '21 Jump Street' And 'The A-Team'

Logan Sachon — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:21:24 +0000

Stephen J. Cannell is the creator of 40 television shows, including 21 Jump Street, The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and The Commish. He has written 450 TV episodes and produced some 1500. His production company is heading up work on feature films of 21 Jump Street and The Rockford Files. Also: he is also a popular mystery writer and has written 14 novels. We spoke at about noon on a Tuesday while he was in the car headed to lunch with a writer in Santa Monica. He had already spent five hours at his desk working on a novel.

THE AWL: I'm overwhelmed. How did you do all this?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I'll tell you how I did it. One is, you don't make television my yourself. It's a collaborative art form-if it's an art form at all; a craft?-and it really comes down to how good the people are that you accumulate around you. And I expect that a lot of my success is from the fact that I had really good actors working with me, I had really good directors working with me, I had great writers that were on my staff that helped me keep those shows fresh and alive. And I'm a fairly diligent writer. I think if you write for five hours everyday, Saturday and Sunday included, for 40 years, you'd be surprised by how much you can write!

THE AWL: Oh my God. Five hours! Do you get up early and do this?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: This morning I was up by 4 but usually I am up by 3:30 and I lift weights for about 40 minutes and then I start.

THE AWL: Do you have one project that you work on at a time or do you have several things going?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I do one at a time. Even when I had multiple shows on the air, I used to keep an average of six hours of TV on at all times because I was running a studio and that was what was required to basically pay my overhead, and it was a private studio, but even then, I'd be writing for all the different shows, so I'd write an episode of 21 Jump Street, and I'd write an episode of Wise Guy, and then I'd write an episode of Hunter and then I'd write an episode of The Commish, and then I'd go back to 21 Jump Street. Sometimes the executive producers would come to me and say, 'Can you give us one to three days, we could sure use the help.' I never had a lazy susan with six scripts going.

THE AWL: How did you get into writing books? Is it two completely different kinds of writing?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: The similarity is, obviously, there is the immense amount of discipline I have for writing, which is very useful in writing a novel. I'll write a chapter a day. Like Hemingway, I bang out 10 pages a day. I'm like Hemingway in that work ethic! I don't compare myself to Hemingway. I plot my book in three act play structures just the way I plotted my hours of television...The one difference is that when you're writing a screenplay everything has to come out of a character's mouth–every plot, every idea, every emotion has to be delivered verbally so that the audience can be aware of it. In a book you have this tool called omniscient author where you can go into the head of your character and deal with the plot directly. Sometimes I'll be writing a script and be setting up a very sensitive emotional scene that I want to deliver on and I'm beginning to realize that to write it, I realize I cannot have these two characters say the things to one and another that I had planned them to say, because it would be rude or it would be inappropriate, and my gut tells me when I become that character and start to see that character say the lines on the paper that I would never say that and I have to adjust the scene to make it realistic and believable. In a novel you would never have that problem.

THE AWL: What were you working on this morning?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I'm writing a novel. I'm way ahead on my novels because I love to write, so I've finished the one that will be out in January, called The Pallbearers, and the one I'm writing now is another Shane Scully book and it won't be out until a year from January and it is called The Prostitute's Ball. It's almost done. And I have a movie script I'm going to write, and I have some acting I'm going to do, so my life is laid out a couple months in advance.

THE AWL: The acting, is that just for fun?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Yeah, pretty much just for fun. I've been doing it for 25 years, and I've gotten to the point where I'm actually not too bad at it. There was a time when I started when I do a part and I would think, 'Oh my God, I was just wonderful,' and I would see it and I stunk up the movie. I ended up being on Renegade for five seasons as a recurring role, I must have been in about 25 or 30 episodes, and I learned to act while I as doing that show. So now when I get jobs I actually can deliver.

THE AWL: Your scenes on Castle are the critics' favorites.

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: They've actually talked to me about coming back.

THE AWL: So 21 Jump Street and The A Team are going to be movies.

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I'm producing both of them; I am not writing them. The A Team is in casting right now, Joe Carnahan is directing it, Ridley Scott is co-producing with me, and Tony Scott is the executive producer. So that's going to be a good movie. We're in negations right now with Liam Neeson to be Hannibal. 21 Jump Street, we're in the second draft on that, I think it's a very funny script, being done by Jonah Hill and a guy named Michael Bacall, who is a really good writer. And we're doing Greatest American Hero through my own studio right now, but it may end up going out, and we have attached a big name director to that.

THE AWL: How do you keep everything straight?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I had times when I was doing six shows simultaneously, and all of those shows were 24 episodes a season, so that's over 100 episodes a year that I was producing.... There were so many episodes floating around at one time at the shop that you got very good at compartmentalizing your thinking. And that's basically all I'm doing now.

THE AWL: When you're writing a book, or when you would write TV shows, do you figure out everything that is going to happen before you even start?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Yes. Totally. I talk to writers all the time who don't do that, they get a concept and have this idea that the characters will lead them through the story, and I can almost tell you when a writer is doing that. The stories tend to wander and do a lot of U-turns and stuff that could be dropped and didn't get dropped because the writer liked it, but it wasn't flowing in the same direction as the story. Plus a lot of writers that do that end up going a couple of acts into it and throwing it away because it wasn't working. I never had enough time to be able to indulge myself like that. I'd rather spend two or three days on a TV show plotting it completely. If it's a novel, it's about 2 weeks after I've done all my research, I sit down and for two weeks all I do is plot. And then I write about a 60 or 70 page narrative, and that's not for my publisher, it's totally for me, it's so I know that the architecture of the story I'm about to start writing is clean, so I don't get two-thirds in and go, this isn't working, I don't know where I'm going, it's all messed up, I don't want to be there. The hardest work of writing a book or a screenplay is plotting it, and I think that's why so many writers choose not to do it. Because you sit there and you scratch your head and think, what am I going to do next? What's the complication at the top of act two, how do I make the story more devastating than it appeared at the beginning, what are my adversaries doing, what's their move, how do I keep them in motion instead of standing still, waiting to be caught.

THE AWL: Did you learn this by doing it?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Yes I'm pretty self taught. I had a great writing instructor at the University of Oregon, he's still up there, his name is Ralph Salisbury. He's retired now, he's a professor emeritus, and he taught me a lot, a lot, a lot about writing, about character creation. But I lived in L.A. and I wanted to write for television and motion pictures and I started to write some spec scripts-and I began to realize I didn't know what I was doing. I realized there's a thing called a complication at the top of act two which is really, really important. If you don't have it, you're dead. It's a piece of the backstory that remains hidden and then rears up at the top of act two and changes everything. When you know that a complication is a piece of the backstory that remains hidden, well, then it's pretty easy. I've got to lace some thing in here in act one that we don't talk about. These guys keep trying to break into her car, and all the sudden we find out she's in the witness protection program and that was something that was hidden from the audience all through the thing, and that's why the boyfriend hero keeps getting beat up.

THE AWL: Do you think you'll start a new TV show ever again?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: Well I'm doing a pilot right now with Janeane Garofalo. We'll see what happens. It's for USA. I did so much television, I kind of felt that I'd been there a long time, and unless I'm doing something that I think is really fresh or different, then I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do Hunter sideways, or Rockford sideways. If I'm going to do it, I want to do something that's never been done before.

THE AWL: Do you watch TV yourself?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: I do. My daughter is directing Monk, so I've gotten very close to that show, I think it's very funny. I'm watching Burn Notice, I like that, I like House, I like Raising the Bar, from my friend Steven Bochco. There's a lot of good stuff.

THE AWL: So if you get up every morning at 3:30, what time do you go to bed?

STEPHEN J. CANNELL: 8 or 8:30. My wife will tell you I'm not a very fun person. But she's been with me for 44 years.

Previously: Damian Mason: Farmer, Corporate Comedian, Bill Clinton Impersonator

Logan Sachon lives in Portland, Oregon. Ways she makes money: tending flowers, making bouquets. Ways she does not make money: writing, optioning things. She is working on changing the latter.
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A Friendly Chat: Damian Mason, Farmer, Corporate Comedian, Bill Clinton Impersonator

Logan Sachon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:21:12 +0000

Damian Mason is a Bill Clinton impersonator, a corporate comedian, and a farmer. He attended Purdue University and was selling lighting fixtures in San Diego when he won a costume contest dressed as Bill Clinton and decided to make a go of it. Today he still does his Bill Clinton show but he also does two shows as himself: one for corporate events, and one for agriculture conferences. Mason is the kind of man that uses your name when he talks to you, and he asked me just as many questions about myself as I did about him. When we spoke, it was lunch time in Indiana. He had just come inside after working on his ranch.

DAMIAN MASON: I'm glancing around at The Awl while we're talking. How do these guys make their money? I see a little bit of advertising for a movie.

THE AWL: I'm not sure! I don't think they do yet!

DAMIAN MASON: It's a very difficult thing to get paid to write. Years and years ago I set a personal goal that I wanted to become a better writer. I'm from Indiana, I was raised on a dairy farm here in Northern Indiana, and had lived in Indianapolis, Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix, and I came back. I live on a farm, a couple hundred acre farm. And I got back here and I contacted newspapers here, and I had three newspapers in Indiana and one newspaper in Kentucky that were carrying me. I really worked at it pretty hard, called editors of small to midsize papers. My goal was to have a dozen, then two dozen. And I tried it, I sent stuff out to syndicates, and I never got anywhere with that... I'm a big fan of newspapers, I read the newspapers. But most people your age, they say, oh I don't need the paper, I get my news on the Internet. But where the hell do they think that comes from? Two dudes at a blog dot com didn't spend three months investigating Enron for an article.

THE AWL: You were already doing your Corporate Comedy at this point?

DAMIAN MASON: Years ago I was a lighting fixture salesperson, and when I was 25 years old, I wasn't enjoying my job that much. I quit my job because I won a Halloween contest dressed up as Bill Clinton in San Diego. I quit my job and became a professional Bill Clinton impersonator. My company used me at trade shows and meetings. I'd dress up as Bill Clinton, make some yuks, have some laughs, take some pictures. I started doing shows on the side, companies, groups, anyone that had 300 bucks I'd do a show for them.

THE AWL: Did you see this as taking off?

DAMIAN MASON: People like to believe, I'm speaking very frankly with you, people with normal jobs, that sit in a cubicle and work for somebody, want to believe that there's never any risk, that' you're just hanging out, drinking beer at a Halloween contest and someone discovered you and made this happen. Well, fuck no, that's not how it happened! I won a goddamned Halloween contest and won some money and I was still selling lighting fixtures! ... I'm entrepreneurial by nature. Trust me, I've heard the degrading remarks, and you've got to shake it off, and I'm talking very frankly, and I'm sorry if you're religious, but every asshole says, "You're making $7500 a show-I wish I looked like Bill Clinton!" But if you looked like Bill Clinton, you'd still be sitting in accounting in your cubicle, complaining about your job.

THE AWL: When did you start doing your other show, as you?

DAMIAN MASON: We always knew the Bill Clinton thing was going to slow down, obviously. No one is doing a Rutherford B. Hayes show.... And it was much more difficult to become Damian Mason than I thought, I thought it'd be a lot easier... Now, not to sound arrogant, but we're starting to roll with the program I do as me. And it's been 7 or 8 years, and it's been a lot of work. I still do my Bill Clinton show, I just did two of them last week. But I'm not going to do a 100 of them a year like I used to do back in the old days.

THE AWL: How much are you traveling?

DAMIAN MASON: This year, let's say I'll do 60 shows, and if you do 60 shows, that's like 100 or 120 days of travel. Sometimes you can drive, sometimes you have to be on an airplane and gone for 2 days.

THE AWL: Do you like traveling?

DAMIAN MASON: I don't like sitting in traffic in a commute, either, and I don't like having a normal job. We make our living off of doing my shows, investments and savings I've accumulated over the years, the farm, my wife's interior design company. The bulk of my income is earned doing the show.

THE AWL: Tell me about the farm.

DAMIAN MASON: We have 200 acres. 125 of it is in corn and soybeans. We have 40 acres of timber that we manage for hardwood timber. We have some conservation land, and we have pasture and beef cattle.

THE AWL: Do you still have fun doing the show?

DAMIAN MASON: Yes. I'm being very frank here: what you must do, in this business, is think of yourself as a product. You are a product. These groups are buying you. So I would say: why are these groups buying you? It's not about me, it's about the group. Without this group, without this 400 person sales meeting in Little Rock, Dallas, Baltimore, or wherever USA, without them, why would they have me? And they wouldn't... One thing that a lot of people struggle with in this business, they forget it's not about you, it's about the group. So I try to look at myself as a product, and I'm very critical of what I do and what happens up on stage... And all though you've heard me swearing a little bit, I don't do that from stage. A lot of these people that do clubs cannot get up and be funny without talking about raunchy stuff. My stuff has to be PG-13. I occasionally push it to R, you've got a group of salespeople, there a little bit raucous, yeah, you can push it to R. but you don't do racial stuff, you don't do that other stuff, you don't do anything close to club material.

THE AWL: Is corporate comedy a big industry? Do you have a lot of competition out there?

DAMIAN MASON: You're competing against the person that's the futurist. Do you know what that is? Because I'm still not sure that I do myself. I think they're scam artists. They come in and say, in the future, consumers will do this. Well, how the hell do you know that? I'm a little skeptical of that, but they are the competition, because for $5000 they'll come in and give you 45 minutes of telling you what the future holds for your business. Now: Ask them to put it in writing on a million dollars contract and none of 'em will sign it. My competition is a hypnotist. My competition is a band. My competition is an economist that will come in and tell you what the economy is doing now and what it will do one year from now. My competition is anything you can plug into that timeslot at dinner or at 8 p.m.

THE AWL: It seems like [your job] is part motivational speaker too?

DAMIAN MASON: I don't like that term. This ain't a pep rally. I know that's a very standard term, but I don't like that term because it gives the idea that I'm up there hootin' and hollerin'.

THE AWL: I imagine you get booked for organizations where you can't even believe this organization really exists.

DAMIAN MASON: The National Bankruptcy Institute I did a while back, and they were celebrating that there were over a million bankruptcies in the U.S. for the first time. That was about ten years ago. Now we're getting closer to two million, because it's become very trendy for people to live beyond their means and not save any money. National Industries for the Blind, and this is not being cruel, but I got booked as Bill Clinton, a look-alike coming in to do Bill Clinton to an audience where a third of them were blind. But you know what? They loved it. So there's organizations out there you can't imagine: Scrap Metal Dealers Associations, it goes on and on.

THE AWL: Have the meetings felt different since the economy went bust?

DAMIAN MASON: First off, things are not nearly as bad as the media says. The media needs to be able to manufacture some threat to your life. Mad Cow, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, asbestos, I mean, come on. Then they also love it if they can have some doom and gloom scenario with business, global climate change, whatever, whatever. I'm in these functions and I'm looking at people and I get them laughing and get them rollin' and then I talk about this, and I say let's talk about how bad business is, because it's not. When I hear this compared to the depression, it's a joke. I was just at Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart's crowded. And I went to dinner the other night, and the restaurant was slammed. And you're telling me this is another Great Depression? I will disagree. So I make that point to my audience.

THE AWL: So there's not a difference in your booking from last year?

DAMIAN MASON: I took a hit in May and in June, I had the worst May I ever had, and this month isn't as good either, and I'll tell you why that happened. Along about January, Barack Obama and people in Congress went on TV and said it was irresponsible to have junkets in Las Vegas and be spending money irresponsibly on fancy sales meetings. So all these companies, whether or not they took any government bailout money or not, cancelled their meetings. Las Vegas lost about a gazillion dollars-I made that number up. You might have also known Barack and Michelle Obama had no problem getting on a private jet and sending 500 secret service agents and tying up the streets of New York City for a date. That wasn't irresponsible, but if companies go and have meetings where they conduct business, that's irresponsible. This is not about me liking or disliking whoever's in office, I could care less, my point is: they screwed up this industry by carrying on about meetings. What are you supposed to do, you've got 400 salespeople all around North America, you're supposed to not have a sales meeting? So yeah, my business took a hit, and I'm not blaming the economy, I'm blaming Washington, D.C.

THE AWL: What makes you laugh?

DAMIAN MASON: I don't go to comedy clubs. If I were a bulldozer operator, I wouldn't get off on going to see people run bulldozers. But there's certain things you can only learn from others. So I bought some DVDs of some people that I'm studying, and I bought them all for different reasons. I bought Bob Newhart, because I have a certain dryness to the way I speak and deliver, and so does he. He's old for me, I'm sure you don't even know who he is-

THE AWL: Oh I know who Bob Newhart is.

DAMIAN MASON: Okay. So I though I'd study him a little bit. I find him funny. I got Jerry Seinfeld's DVD. Always loved his television program, thought it was very well done. Sitting down and having a conversation and playing cards and drinking beers with five of my buddies, that makes me laugh. Simple, but I'm a simple guy. I laugh at stuff that is not dumb humor. Everything can't be Mensa humor, because everyone isn't in Mensa. ... The show The Office is brilliant, and it's being copied now, and it will be bastardized. And that show came from across the pond anyway, it's an Americanized version of the British show. I like Family Guy, done by Seth MacFarlane. I would actually love to meet Seth MacFarlane sometime. He is way head and shoulders beyond me but I think that show is as good as a television show as there is. It is brilliant beyond brilliant to me. I bet there's about 12 gags per show that the average person doesn't see.... So The Office and Family Guy and you've got to put Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert up there. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is brilliant. He may be a little liberal because I'm a little more conservative, but you don't let that get in the way. For years I did a political comedy show and people would always ask me what my true beliefs were and I would tell them that I read an article in Playboy magazine with an interview with Jay Leno, and they asked Jay why he didn't get more involved with his own political beliefs in his monologue, and he said "There's an old saying among prostitutes: if you start to come with your client, you should get out of business." I know that's a little rated-R quote for you, but it wasn't me that said it, it was Jay Leno. And I sort of adhere to that, I do. By the way the best show that's on television period is not a comedy, it's called Mad Men on AMC.

THE AWL: If you meet someone new, and they say what do you do, how do you describe what you do?

DAMIAN MASON: I probably just say I'm self-employed. I was asked once by a person in customs what I did and I just told them farmer, because I didn't want to get into it. I have a card that my wife says is ridiculous but I hand it out all the time; it just says "Business Man."

THE AWL: So do you see yourself doing this for another 16 years?

DAMIAN MASON: Yeah, I think so. When I first started out we had to put together packages with VCR tapes. And then we did DVDs and CD ROMS and that and now a lot of people just go to my website and check the video out there. So that part has gotten easier.... The travel has gotten harder, it's way less enjoyable than it was, with the TSA, which does not make me feel safer at all. The one thing that I would tell you that bothers me is the distractions. We did a show on Friday at noon and one third of the people wouldn't set their Blackberries down.. I could take any one of those Blackberries and pick it up and say, show me the last 20 communications you were just sending while I was on stage, and it would say things like, "Yeah, not much, how about you, sure, great, see you there, okay, how about 3, call me"-you know what I'm saying? And for that, they're missing out on 45 minutes of really spectacular entertainment, and that's probably the biggest frustration I have... My marketing person asked me if I wanted to do Twitter, she's got me on Facebook and MySpace and all that stuff, and I said, does this mean that a bunch of 14-year-olds are going to try to book me to do a show in their mom and dad's basement? ... I was 25 when I quit my job to end up doing this, and I had three shows lined up for the rest of my life, making about $2000. I'm only saying that because the idea that there is going to be a great deal of security when you step out and try something new, there probably won't be a great deal of security. But don't kid yourself. There's no such thing as security. Well, there's not! Do you think these people at these companies that are getting tossed out of business are secure? They're not. Do what you like!

Logan Sachon lives in Portland, Oregon. Ways she makes money: tending flowers, making bouquets. Ways she does not make money: writing, optioning things. She is working on changing the latter.
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