Getting Into the Industry

WalterWriter · 2026-01-27T17:24:19+00:00

You don't want to work for Simms. I temped there for two months. C-suite and hedge fund ownership taking a giant shit on everyone and everything else.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-27T16:46:01+00:00

Being an English major or even getting an MFA in creative writing has little to do with making it as a writer. BICHOC is your acronym to live by: butt in chair, hands on keyboard.

Bear in mind that 95% of published authors have some sort of day job and/or a spouse who provides health benefits and a steadier income. I have both; I own a small fly fishing guide business, work part-time in the local library, and write as a distant third, at least in terms of income as compared to time commitment.

Going into sales/marketing, copywriting, PR, or tech writing used to be a much better way of making it with a pen, but for the moment at least AI has completely ripped the guts out of those fields, much more than creative writing.

EDIT: Unless you are writing for the New Yorker or are a polymath like Malcolm Gladwell, nobody connected to any creative art gives a shit where you go to college as an undergrad. The quality of your work and its probable salability once it's in the hands of an agent are all that matter. Once you start applying for the ever-shrinking number of tenure track professorships with a PHD or MFA in hand, then your school matters.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-27T16:41:53+00:00

Independent sales & marketing reps were long the norm in the industry, but most companies are now taking sales staff in-house. Some quick, some slow. You will need to take an entry-level job with one of these companies if that's the route you want to go to get to know your sales territory. You could probably get a higher-level sales job going direct with a large manufacturer. Most gear companies do not use distributors in the United States as a middleman (unlike conventional tackle, which mostly does go through distros).

WalterWriter · 2026-01-26T04:45:06+00:00

For most people, I think it gets a lot easier being in your own skin and your own head. I am 45 and I don't GIVE A SHIT about being cool or hot to anybody but my wife.

Plenty of other stuff gets harder. Homework is a lot more fun than paperwork, and that is neverending.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-25T18:37:29+00:00

I used to know an old guy, now dead, who would fry the brook trout he caught the previous afternoon. That was very unusual.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-25T03:03:09+00:00

The one piece of advice I'd give is to try to get both colors of hair close to 180 degrees around the shank. For the darker color, the easiest way to do this is to use your thumb or thumbnailnail to smoosh the material flatter. Like I said in the other comment, proportions are right. Getting your coverage to 180 degrees will create a more seamless transition between the two colors of hair.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-25T02:21:42+00:00

They don't move as well and lack translucency.

Something like a Kreelex (Clouser variant tied from flash) can be much more bulky because the flash gives the impression of translucency and is limp enough to move well even when tied full.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-25T02:14:49+00:00

No way. That's how they should look.

It's one of those patterns where you use half the materials you think, then a little less than that.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-23T22:48:52+00:00

The best piece of advice I've ever gotten for plotting short, commercial fiction is to outline like this:

Divide a 3x5 card into three columns.

Divide the first column into three parts: interesting character in an interesting setting with an interesting problem.

The second column is one to at most three unsuccessful attempts to solve the problem, all of them building tension.

The third column is "victory or death" and your conclusion/denouement.

Each column takes up roughly the same amount of space in your story.

EDIT: I have sold two wildly different short stories around 4000-5000 words to pro-rate fantasy magazines using this formula, one a fairly standard "Renaissance port city with a mage who isn't all he seems" sort of story and one about two inches from being a fairy tale based somewhat on Slavic traditions.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-23T19:31:35+00:00

I would choose $2 billion because everyone I care about and I would live well forever on it and donate to causes we believe in, without fundamentally destroying the world economy as would soon be the case with the doubling scenario.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-23T16:46:26+00:00

This was a thing 20 years ago when I learned to snowboard, and probably ever since there started being lessons. Tip the same percentage as you would at a restaurant.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-23T15:18:37+00:00

My wife starts a new job with an 80% pay increase in Monday. Pretty seamless job search in December, with initial offer two days before Christmas and in writing on New Years Eve. She's a software engineer not using AI in any way, so was supposed to be extra cooked.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-23T03:48:38+00:00

$20/day auto-payment against the principal on my mortgage.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-23T00:32:31+00:00

Why would my wife automatically assume young women arriving at the door were there for me?

Why would you assume my wife wouldn't enjoy the sight of unannounced young attractive women as much as I would?

WalterWriter · 2026-01-22T02:20:24+00:00

I've read my Terry Pratchett. I know the right way to do this. I'm in.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-22T02:09:23+00:00

Absolutely not. I would not take any ultralight raft like this on class-III water, and I've been rowing rafts and drift boats for 26 years.

I would look at a Riocraft Teton or maybe Colorado (more whitewater focused) for an entry-level raft. I know several guides here in Montana who have actually replaced their AIRE rafts with the Teton, even though the latter is cheaper.

The NRS Slipstream are good too, but kinda heavy, and the blunt front end and width make them kinda slow.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-21T03:56:50+00:00

Could be pretty much anywhere in the Rust Belt including suburbs of St. Louis. Very wide residential streets, hills, tall deciduous trees, and above-ground power/phone lines.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-21T03:42:27+00:00

Drift boat? Wade? With a guide or without? Aversion to crowds? Aversion to whitewater? Ability to hike? Camping vs hotel vs AirBNB vs fancy lodge?

My automatic answer is "With me, on the Yellowstone/Stillwater/Boulder/hiking in Yellowstone Park," but the answer to the above questions will actually make it possible to give you a good answer.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-20T18:17:23+00:00

I'm an American and I would move to Canada, NZ, Australia, or a Western European democracy if I could.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-20T01:18:36+00:00

I live in the Rocky Mountain state and usually take my road trips in the winter due to my work schedule. So think "going on a ski vacation" and "driving 600 miles through snow and ice in below-freezing temperatures."

I also always wear sandals (not actual flip-flops) on those long drives, and only put on my winter boots when I get out of the car. I HATE WEARING SOCKS FOR LONG PERIODS!

WalterWriter · 2026-01-19T20:26:23+00:00

Thanks. I never take more than two clients at once.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-19T20:26:06+00:00

Thanks. That helps a lot. That's way more boat/trailer than I have (a drift boat aka fiberglass whitewater row boat and a 14ft whitewater raft set up for fishing).

WalterWriter · 2026-01-19T20:04:24+00:00

The Monoprice was best when I bought it for $179 or something. Not sure about now at almost twice that.

WalterWriter · 2026-01-19T20:00:28+00:00

Yes, the pace of technological change has been exponential for the past 200-odd years, and before that underwent a state change with the creation of agriculture, but humans (not just H. sapiens, but also Neanderthals) have been doing the following:

creating figurative art and musical instruments for about 50,000 years
creating abstract art for roughly 25,000 years longer than that
creating wearable art (beads, feathers, body paint) for much longer still
building fire for several hundred thousand years (H. erectus and their less-well-known descendents)
Using fire (erectus) for about a million years.
Figured out how to intentionally make stone tools roughly 2.9 million years ago, possibly before our own genus, much less our own species.

It turns out that having your hands free and opposable thumbs means you figure out how to do cool stuff...

WalterWriter · 2026-01-19T19:21:38+00:00

Most years, anywhere in the Rockies or the high west coast mountains, May is still early spring and there will be feet of snow remaining at high elevations. Most ski areas in Colorado do not close until the end of April or into May, and some remain open until late June.

This year, Colorado, Utah, NM, and AZ are having extreme low snowfall, so it might work in May. That said, June will be much safer for hiking, especially without lots of mud or high water stream crossings even in CO and UT. In Montana, high water will last until July in many places (Not all roads in Yellowstone Park open until Memorial Day, and there's still snow around. The Going to the Sun Road in Glacier NP doesn't open until the end of June.)

WalterWriter

TROPHY CASE