Matthew Wayne Selznick

In my quest for freelance and full-time work both on-site and remote, I look at a lot of Craig’s List ads. I mean, a lot. I have RSS feeds that bring me postings for writing, editing and tech-related opportunities from all over the country. I respond to three to ten posts nearly every day of the week.

I’m discovering that many, many posts with very specific indications of need are actually affiliate or broker scams.

In other words, you respond to an ad stating they have “an urgent need for writers” and it turns out they’re a for-pay service that will send you links to sites you could find on your own with a Google search. Or a “writer / editor” post in the Inland Empire (near where I live) requests that all applicants post their resume at this site, which doesn’t actually have a place to post a resume but does have some Google ads and Amazon affiliate links… and nearly every link on the page that isn’t an ad goes to Monster.com.

I’m sick of this; to the point where I’m very close to abandoning Craig’s List as a viable market to look for work. The only reason I might continue looking is to flag these misleading bastards when I find them — it appeals to my desire for justice and urge to rabble-rouse.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. While you’re here, so this isn’t a post purely dedicated to my bitching and whining, you might as well download my creative / new media resume and my retail resume… I encourage you to pass ‘em on, with my gracious thanks.

I’ve made a few adjustments to the web site — some are complete, some are in progress, some are pending.

First and foremost: I’ve eliminated the forums because the echoing sound of crickets chirping and pins dropping was keeping all the other websites on the Internet awake at night. This is not a great loss, honestly — participation was low, and even I had trouble deciding what should be a blog post and what should be a forum post. Plus, the next version of WordPress will have threaded comments built in, so every blog post will be very conversation friendly. If you miss the forum… let me know in the comments of this post. (See what I did there?)

Next: Since I’m actively seeking gainful freelance and / or permanent employment at the moment, I’ve added my resumes to the site, as well as a selection of endorsements and recommendations folks have written on my behalf. If you need (or know of anyone who needs) a writer, editor and new media expert with an emphasis on podcasting who is equally admired and respected by dot-com CEOs, social media superstars and independent creative types alike, here I am!

Also: I’m actively promoting freelance activities I’ve done in the past, including story consultation for fiction writers, podcast and new media consultation, and writing and editing. I’ve provided professional critiques and writing assistance for independent authors like podcast novel pioneer Paul Story, created podcasting solutions for companies like Shout! Factory and Gerber & Co. and helped folks with custom WordPress installations and themes. I’m looking to do more.

Soon, I’ll be adding rate cards for my podcasting and other tech services, providing details for folks who want to book me as a speaker and creating a media page. I plan on expanding the Mall with more departments in my Amazon store and a CD Baby store with links to all the bands I’ve played on my podcasts.

Is there anything you think I should add?

Yesterday afternoon, my boss brought the editorial staff of Mahalo into a meeting and announced with great regret that layoffs have become necessary.

I won’t get into the details of how many stayed and how many went — I’m sure others will jump on that before the end of the day — but I am among those who went. Yesterday was my last day in the Santa Monica office; Thursday will be my last day on the payroll.

In the current economic climate, anyone in a start-up right now, whether venture capital-backed or bootstrapped, has to be ready for this kind of thing. The writing has been on the wall for a few weeks. Through the month I’ve watched companies large and small, including Lulu.com, Myxer, Wikia and of course Yahoo! cut rank and file and executive jobs. Friends of mine have been personally affected. Cuts at Mahalo didn’t really come as a surprise to me.

I hope Mahalo weathers the storm — we’ve been doing some really interesting stuff in the last few months, and there’s lots of excellent stuff on the table, so stay tuned there.

Meanwhile, what am I doing to weather the storm?

I’ll be doing freelance work for Mahalo to keep some income flowing. I’m seeking other opportunities, both short and long-term, freelance and permanent. Since I’m a couple hours outside of Los Angeles, central Orange County and San Diego, I’m especially interested in remote work.

Today begins the process of updating my resume and spreading the word. I’d like to continue working in information tech and content creation — I’m a writer and editor with experience managing content producers and online communities. I’m a recognized authority on social and new media with an emphasis on podcasting. I’ve done a fair bit of freelance fiction and non-fiction critique, counseling and editing. I enjoy these endeavors, so if you need someone we should talk.

I’ll be rolling out some income-producing creative projects — writing, podcasting, and video. Some of these things have been kicking around in my head for a few months; I now have the time to put them into action. No one thing will financially sustain me; the goal is to set up several steady streams of incremental income with long-tail value. For more on all of that, watch this space for announcements, or subscribe to my occasional newsletter.

Speaking of time, I’ve gained about eighty hours a month now that I’m no longer driving to Santa Monica five days a week. This means, quite suddenly, that I no longer need to record podcasts while I’m sitting in my car… and so I no longer need / want the Zoom H4 portable digital recorder I was raising funds to acquire. Granted, I’ll have to dedicate a lot of time to the pursuit of gainful employment, but I should be able to podcast more often, and from my home.

In the interest of generating income with my creativity, I’d like to return to composing and recording music. I’m most comfortable doing this on acoustic guitar… but I haven’t owned an acoustic guitar for over a year. So I’m changing the donation campaign goal from a portable digital recorder to a decent acoustic guitar. The campaign will run until November 14 — whatever you can provide large or small, I appreciate. If I don’t raise $300.00 before the end of the campaign, I’ll give every contributor a refund. It’s all or nothing… I hope you’ll help!

That’s the news! I’ve got some anxiety — it took a while to sleep last night, and I woke up very early this morning — but there are a lot of folks much worse off than me, and I’m optimistic by nature and confident in my abilities. Time to get busy.

As you know, Bob, I work for Mahalo.com, the Santa Monica, California Internet start-up backed by Sequoia Capital (and others) and run by Jason Calacanis. Mahalo.com is a human-curated search site that strives to provide high-quality results for the terms most people search for the most often. Examples are all over this paragraph. Here are some more.

Part of my job involves screening and helping train the freelancers that make up part of our editorial team. Right now, I’m looking for about a dozen freelance writers who can commit twenty to forty eight hours per week.

This gig is not for every writer, and there is a learning curve. The right freelancer has excellent writing skills, including the ability to write fast and concise copy from a neutral point of view. In addition, they are experienced Internet researchers who can tell high quality sites from spam, advertorials and scraped content harvesters. Familiarity with AP style and mediawiki markup is a plus.

It occurs to me… I know some writers. Those writers know writers. It also strikes me that most writers are looking for ways to make money with words. If that’s you, freelancing for Mahalo.com is something you should look into.

Questions? Contact matt @ mahalo dot com after you read this.

Pass it on, share it, re-blog it, microblog it, and so on. Thanks!

Just in the last month or so, I’ve reconnected with several folks I haven’t heard from since elementary and high school. This has been a special pleasure — a real treat. I realized I should catch these people up on what’s been going on with me for the last twenty to thirty years… and then I recognized that this is probably going to keep happening, so why not do it once, here?

So… my family left Glendora for Mission Viejo in… 1978? I got there in time for sixth grade. I don’t recall much, except for having a crush on the little red-headed girl (Charlie Brown, much?) and experiencing the effects of one of my best friend’s parents’ divorce (he had to move away.) Junior high school was interesting — I broke both of my wrists (at the same time) and so spent a good part of one semester with casts on both arms. Awesome.

In the summer of 1981, between junior high and high school, my friend Matt Maxwell and I collaborated on a “novel” called “Devastator.” It took everything we loved about comic books and science fiction and, well, smeared it with fourteen-year-old enthusiasm and inexperience. Somewhere, I still have my copy. Matt has threatened to kill me if it ever sees the light of day. Fair enough… but the baby universe we created with that manuscript has expanded to influence a whole lot of my creative output since then. These days, Matt is actually in the comics industry, and I’ve written a novel and a bunch of other stuff.

High school… I went to Capistrano Valley High from 1981 - 1985. I remember Karen Wynn (journalism, yearbook, photography) and Paul Pfleuger (contemporary world problems) as my favorite, most positively influential teachers. I started playing bass guitar in high school, when I was sixteen, and picked up the acoustic guitar two years later. Me and my friends talked a lot about starting bands, but nothing serious ever happened until the tail end of my senior year, when me and Roger Huff started up an acoustic duo that had many names and incarnations over the next few years.

Of all my friends from high school, I still keep track of my best friend (though we are rarely in direct contact despite the fact that we have very similar interests and passions) and my longest steady girlfriend. Through the magic of blogs and other threads, we can trace each other’s lives even if we rarely get in touch. It’s comforting to know they’re out there, though.

My first job out of high school was at the Tower Records in El Toro at El Toro Road and Rockfield. I worked in the video department for a year and a half. That was an eye-opening experience. I met many people who would be very important in my life for years and years to come — people who, through the lines of connection hindsight gives us, truly changed my life. I go into that in more detail here. It’s enough for now to say that the eighteen or so months there went a very long way to making me the person I am today.

In the late eighties, I had played my first live gigs in real bands. Psychopathway was the first, with Theresa Copell, Tony Lekas, and Steve Harvey. We played around San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Doheney Beach, and a couple of parties in Los Angeles and Davis. I played bass and shared vocals and songwriting duties with Steve and Theresa. After that came Loveless with Gus Contreras, Kyle Hall, and Marco Solferino. We played pretty much all the same places Psychopathway did, plus the occasional gig in Costa Mesa and Anaheim. I played the legendary Linda’s Doll Hut while I was with Loveless, a place I would play many more times with other bands.

In the late eighties, I moved a lot, had a steady string of relationships, a series of jobs (mostly retail), partied a lot, played a lot of music, and lived several movies I have yet to write. In other words, I was in my early twenties.

In between bands, I played a lot of solo acoustic shows — singer / songwriter stuff. I also wrote, here and there, but didn’t have much discipline for it. I enjoyed creating the settings — what’s known as worldbuilding — more than the actual writing. I recognize it now as a form of procrastination, which is another name for not wanting to face the possibility of failure. Still, I was very creative in those days, if scattered.

At the beginning of the nineties, I met the woman who would become my first wife. We married in 1995. She was a good friend, but I think we both came into things with far too much baggage and I, for one, was not mature enough to properly deal with it all. It’s a long story, of course, but we separated in October of 1999 and were divorced by August of 2000.

From 1995 to 2005, I worked for Borders, a worldwide chain of book, music, and media superstores. It was, overall, a very positive experience. While they are a dying company as I write this, in the late nineties it was an amazing place to work — open, ambitious, and compassionate as a corporate culture can be. I wouldn’t take back the time I spent there for anything.

Music kept happening in the nineties. From about 1993 - 1995, I was in a band I formed that, to date, was my most satisfying creative experience. Called PIGBAT, it was a power trio featuring drummer Jon Strunk and guitarist Kris Shine. I played bass, sang, and wrote most of the songs — though it was, musically, a very collaborative effort. Our drummer left to take a job offer in San Francisco, and while we continued briefly with a different drummer (Jeff Senske, now with Bright Men of Learning) it just didn’t last. I played dozens and dozens of acoustic solo gigs, formed two short-lived duos (Widdershins and Wednesday In The Barrel) and, toward the end of the century, joined with Gary Fitch, Erin Foster, and Tony Dare to form the power-pop Running Erin. Running Erin lasted until 2002 or or so.

The Internet, you will recall, happened in the nineties, too. I think I first got online in 1996 or so. I remember exploring Gopher and using the Mosaic browser, if that gives you some idea. Webcrawler was the search engine everyone swore by. I was entranced by the whole thing.

In 1998, I read a particularly bad tie-in novel featuring Marvel Comics’ X-Men characters. Now, as mentioned above, I’m a long-time fan of the comics, but this book was just… so… very… bad. I told myself I could do better, and set about planning a universe of my own wherein I could tell super-hero stories. Gradually, the idea grew to become a web-based magazine called Sovereign Serials. From 1998 until 2002, with varying regularity, I used Sovereign Serials to tell episodic stories set in the Sovereign Era, when “individuals with remarkable abilities change the course of human destiny..!” I also invited other authors to tell Sovereign Era stories in the magazine, and ran two or three.

By the end, I realized I had written more than sixty thousand words over the course of almost four years. I could have written a novel! I shelved the floundering Sovereign Serials to do just that. There were a few false starts. During this time, people wrote me to ask if I would ever finish the stories in Sovereign Serials — one story in particular. I began to write the book that would become my first novel, “Brave Men Run.”

In February of 2001, I married a second time. I know, that seems like tight timing, but we had known each other a few years, although not well, and had the occasion to spend a great deal of time together in a very short period of time. We fell in love — that’s how it happens sometimes..! We lived in her apartment in San Pedro for a time, and bought a house in Hesperia, a community in the High Desert of San Bernardino County in 2002. We’re here still, with our four cats, two dogs, and a turtle.

In 2004, driving “down the hill” to work in Pasadena, I heard an episode of Leo Laporte’s “The Tech Guy” call-in talk radio show. His guest was Adam Curry, and they were talking about this crazy new media thing called podcasting. I was inspired. In less than a week, on October 15th, I released the first episode of the MWS Media Radio Show. That podcast, now called the DIY Endeavors podcast, has had sixty five episodes to date. The first sixty were very nearly weekly. These days, I record one when the mood to create a mix tape of excellent independent music strikes me.

Podcasting is another one of those things that has changed my life in a major way. The people I’ve met, the things I’ve learned, the opportunities presented to me… let’s run down a few:

• When “Brave Men Run” was finished, I knew I would self-publish in keeping with the DIY ethic. I also decided to follow the example of the handful of people who put their books out as free podcasts. At the time, those people were Tee Morris, Scott Sigler, Mark Jeffrey, and Paul Story. “Brave Men Run” wasn’t the first podcast novel by any means, but I’m pretty sure it was among the first dozen. It’s been in two different top ten lists at Podiobooks.com perpetually since it came out, and donations from listeners — people who listen under no obligation to pay anything, mind you — have surpassed royalties from the print, e-book, and CD audiobook versions of the book.
• The day after Thanksgiving in 2005, I left Borders and embarked on fifteen months of promoting “Brave Men Run” and doing freelance work. I did some fiction editing, but my biggest clients wanted me to help them with their podcasting. While my first run at being a freelancer didn’t have long-term sustainability, if you will, it would have been a much shorter run if not for podcasting.
• I’ve become a recognized authority, which has led to speaking engagements at several conventions. I’ve been profiled in “Tricks of the Podcasting Masters” and on About.com , and interviewed on scores of podcasts and websites.
• Through my friendship with two podcasters, I was brought on at Mahalo.com , which is proving to be a challenging, enriching, and fun experience. We’re doing social search on the Internet in a way that hasn’t been done yet (or still.)
• The best thing podcasting has given me is a far-flung network of friends. Podcasting has given me my tribe, and that’s worth more than anything.

We’re pretty much caught up, folks. As I write this, I’m working at Mahalo.com, writing my second novel, “Pilgrimage,” and taking a hiatus from recording podcasts until the book is finished and ready to launch.

How are you? It’s very cool to hear from you again.