Back from somewhere – my return to The Georgia Straight

Chris Brayshaw at Pulpfiction Books in Vancouver. Janet McDonald/Georgia Straight photo.

I have a story in The Georgia Straight this week on bookstores in Vancouver.

In it, I talk to Chris Brayshaw, the owner of Pulpfiction Books, about opening a third store in the city when most bookstores seem to be shutting their doors. I also talk to Celia Duthie, who ran a local bookstore franchise before Chapters moved in and ruined everything. Brayshaw had some things to say about the way Duthie ran her chain that didn’t make it into the story, mostly because I didn’t want it to turn into a he-said/she-said type of thing.

It’s my first piece for the news and entertainment weekly in something like three years. In the interim I’ve been publishing and editing my own online magazine (The Snipe News) and taking the odd freelance assignment on the side – mostly for TVW (formerly TV Week) magazine, for which I’m still currently writing a weekly tech page (gadget and app reviews).

The return is bittersweet. I was hoping to not have to return to freelance writing, which I’d done for 15 years when I (more or less) stopped. I can’t say that I’ve missed it… the only thing worse than the constant hustling and rejection is acceptance and having to meet deadlines! Plus I certainly didn’t miss the grind of interviewing musicians week after week (no offense to them, I just ran out of questions – though that certainly hasn’t stopped me; see my recent Lindi Ortega interview for The Snipe), which is the niche that I (along with too many others) had carved out for myself at the Straight.

The funny thing is, one of the editors also accepted a pitch for a story about crowd-sourced funding, which I submitted last week – only to find in this week’s paper a rant written by another writer about that very thing. So far his opinion piece has received more 350 comments – whereas mine, which takes a more (and now, it seems, pathetically) sincere approach, will be lucky to get three.

Why isn’t everyone doing it?

Why isn’t everyone doing this, I asked myself the other day.

Well, of course there’s a reason – it’s kind of insane. One person can’t really go up against the huge media conglomerates. To publish a magazine – even online – takes money and time and people skills and other things most working journalists and freelance writers don’t have much of, as I know from experience.

Yet I’m still a little surprised to look around me and not see the Internet landscape littered with other on-line magazines published by my contemporaries and former workmates. (Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough.) When I started this blog, which I then spun off into an online magazine, it seemed like a bit of a no-brainer; then again, if someone had told me what a money and time drain it would be, and the chances of success (nil to none), I probably wouldn’t have taken it on.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this post – that I’m taking the blog in a different direction.

Up until now it’s been a showcase for odds ‘n’ ends that I didn’t think were right for the site proper (that is, The Snipe). In fact the site developed out of the blog (The Snipe was originally known as Guttersnipe as well) and I originally wanted to keep it going as an adjunct to the main site. But since it’s become harder and harder to find time to update it and anyway, except for the odd Shoe Star profile, there’s not much I think belongs on the blog instead of the site, well, I haven’t been feeling very inspired.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I now want to use the blog for what a blog is meant to be – something far more personal than regular journalistic enterprises. Usually on The Snipe we like to keep at least some journalistic standards, but on Guttersnipe I’ll be throwing all that out the window.

So what can you expect, for those of you still with me? I think one of the topics I want to discuss is editing and publishing a website. I’ve learned a lot in the two-and-a-half-years I’ve been running this thing, and I’m going to share as much of it as I can remember with you, the reader.

Which brings me back to, Why aren’t more working journalists and freelance writers online publishing their own magazine? The answer of course is, because most of them are too busy, or aren’t ego’d out enough to think they can make it work. They don’t have anything to prove, they don’t have a grudge against former employers (and employers to dense to hire them, haha) to inspire them.

I admit to all of these unseemly human motivations. However, I also remember fantasizing about having my own magazine (Vibe I think the teenaged me wanted to call it. Seriously). This memory is something that’s really only occurred to me in recent days, and though I don’t put too much stock in it – I also had daydreams about marrying Pat Benatar and being the last man on Earth, fighting hordes of vampire-zombies – it reassures me to know that at least part of my motivation originates at a time before all the other creaky motivations of adulthood crept in.