I Got Paid To Make A YouTube Show! Here's What I Learned

This entry in my continuing series about a working writer, writing about writing, is about the time Macaulay Culkin hired me to write a YouTube show. Yes, it's true, someone paid me money to write and produce a YouTube show, which is, I guess, the dream? I mean, it's definitely someone's dream I'm just not totally sure it's mine. So how did I end up making a YouTube show for Macaulay Culkin? Well...

Back in 2017, Macaulay Culkin launched Bunny Ears, a short-form comedy site that was meant to satirize celebrity lifestyle sites like Goop. It was the most fun project I've ever worked on in my entire life. I met so many cool female comedians because they hired a ton of talented women, and they paid better than any other short-form comedy site (pro-tip most of them don't pay anything, the well-known ones pay around $30 per article).

One of the best things about Bunny Ears was that there was lots of room for experimentation. It was new, and they had big ideas and general directions they wanted to go in, but there weren't a lot of set rules. I got to write my first television pilot and pitch it to Macaulay Culkin! It was like Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets The Hallmark Channel. A woman who inherits a bakery learns that she's also inherited a portal to hell. There were puppets! It was ambitious.

At one point, Bunny Ears teamed up with a YouTube studio to start producing shows. I decided I wanted to get in on that action. One of my policies with work is to never say no to anything unless I physically cannot manage the time. I never say no to things just because I've never done them before. I watched a lot of YouTube shows, mainly a lot of stuff on Cracked like OPCD, and After Hours, I figured how hard could it be? I can pump out an episode a week for 8 weeks, probably. This is like watching Usain Bolt run a mile and saying yeah, I can probably do that like two minutes faster.

Writing, filming, and editing, a YouTube show in a week, while also doing other work, is a tall fucking order, you guys. It was a BAD idea. Don't do this. Don't be like me. Do you know why most polished, well written, YouTube shows update bi-weekly or once a month? Because that's how long it takes! And they usually have multiple people working on them. This was literally all me.

Jesus Herman Christ, I was stupid. I filmed the pilot to make sure I was capable of making the show at all, and I thought it turned out pretty good. I used some research that I loved and had been trying to wriggle into a Cracked article for months, but it just never quite worked. The Bunny-Ears staff were crazy about it and ordered a full season of the show right away.

We signed a contract for a ten-episode first season, but after eight, it was pretty clear the show wasn't taking off, and also the workload was breaking all of the bones in my body, so I said, "Hey guys how about just 8" and they very nicely agreed.

I made the show nostalgia-themed because I thought that would appeal to Bunny Ears' core audience of people who were really into Macaulay Culkin. Unfortunately, these people were mainly concerned about why I wasn't Macaulay Culkin, and where was Macaulay Culkin, and also did I know him, and were we friends? I think part of the reason the show didn't do very well is that many of the people following Bunny Ears were just in it for Mack stuff, and if Mack wasn't in it, they weren't interested.

(Obligatory disclaimer I always have to add when I talk about Bunny Ears stuff: I was in a few meetings with Mack. He treated his employees super well, even gave us a Christmas bonus one year, which is unheard of for contractors. He seemed very nice and yes, normal).

Another weird issue with the show came from the YouTube studio in LA that Bunny Ears was working with. I did 99% of the editing for the show as part of my contract. I chose that option because it paid more, but honestly, I'm not a fantastic editor. I used iMovie to edit the whole thing, and Bunny Ears Editor-In-Cheif would occasionally add in an extra graphic or effect if they thought it was needed. I think the YouTube studio designed the opening credits, but other than that, they only had one major impact on the show, and it's a weird one.

After I had already completed the first two episodes, they informed us that I could never have a clip take up a full screen. If I wanted to show clips at all, it could only be tiny ones, along with my reaction to them. If we didn't do this, the videos would be dinged for copyright infringement and taken down. We went back and forth on this a little, and I tried to explain fair use and critique and how tons of other shows use this, and yes, they get challenged but rarely completely taken off YouTube. In the end, they were a big LA YouTube studio who knew things, and I was a woman who had seen a YouTube once, so I figured they were right and reedited the second episode the way they wanted, but it looks super weird and continues to look weird for the whole series.

I think the episode I linked at the top of the article is the best episode of the show. It has a good cold open, it's on a topic I know a lot about and have a LOT of opinions on, and it's got puppets. Apparently, I'm really into puppets? The most popular episode of the show is this one. It's got almost 10K views, and that's because Mack went on some other big show and got them to link to me (again Mack is very nice). I think the bait and switch in the title also helped.

Many of the comments on this episode are about how my sound sucks, which is apparently really important to the discerning YouTuber viewer. I filmed most of the show in a loft, using a comforter clipped to a backdrop bar to muffle the echo. I also didn't have a mic at all; I just use the one attached to my iPhone, which I filmed the whole thing with.

My total investment in the show was maybe $100 for a lighting kit, a backdrop kit that came three backdrops (green, black, and white) and various props for the show, including a cake that said Women! on it and a bottle of cheap champaign that also served as that day's craft services. There was talk of a season two for Rewind, Rethink. I was planning a trip to LA anyway, and the head of Bunny Ears talked about possibly meeting up with me, and another writer for the site he thought might be interested in hosting the show if we moved the production to LA and more of the work was done by the YouTube studio. Something I was very in favor of.

The writing was always my favorite part of the project. I'm a writer, I don't hate performing, but I'm always more comfortable off camera. I think I could have been better if I wasn't so exhausted from putting out a show a week, but we'll never know. Obviously, Bunny Ears is still out there, but they're no longer updating regularly. It's sad, but what a great ride while it lasted! No more Bunny Ears means no season 2, though.

I'm not sure if Bunny Ears owns Rewind Rethink? I went back and checked my email as I was writing this, and we never had a formal contract. I'm apparently also supposed to be getting 40% of the ad revenue from the show, but with most of the episodes having only 2K views, I'm probably not missing much. It was cool to work with people in LA on a video project. The studio was based in Beverly Hills, which made me feel fancy by association. Would I ever do YouTube again? Yes. Would I do it exactly the same way obviously not. Some days I was writing a show in between takes of filming a show, and if I wasn't doing that, I was editing the last episode in-between takes filming the current episode.

I won't miss the one guy who commented: "How you Doin" on every single one of my videos, or the occasional "would smash" that confused the hell out of me because I weigh 200 pounds if anyone is getting smashed in this interaction it's you bitch. I will miss getting to do something that weird every day. One time I got in a fight with my husband (because I was overworked), and I was crying and saying over the phone, "I just don't think you take my job seriously" as I glued a Chicken McNugget to a tiny popsicle cross.

Learn from my mistakes. Take things 60% slower then you think you should. Invest in better equipment. Don't read the comments. Take any help you can with editing, writing, or performing. Maybe do have a friend read the comments and pass along the helpful ones. Oh, and if you get the chance, work for Macaulay Culkin! I highly recommend it!

So You Say You Want To Work With Female Writers, But Do You?

Being a writer means maintaining a weird ego balance between, “I am the smartest person on the planet, my 170,000 word Guardians Of The Galaxy fanfic is better than the movie,” and “My editor is smarter than me and I should accept their very good advice that my Guardians Of The Galaxy fanfic is not better than the movie.” You have to learn not just to take rejection but to learn from it and let it make you better. However, that doesn’t mean you have to take every editors opinion as gospel.

Recently I got a rejection that didn’t sit right with me.  It wasn’t from someone I typically work for and it wasn’t the type of writing that I normally do, so for a while I wrote it off as probably all my fault. I was pitching a horror Novella to a company that said it really wanted to hear from female authors. In fact at the time they were only taking pitches from female authors.

I have an old screenplay about a brain slug that comes to earth to try and enslave humanity but ends up falling in love with country music and decides to try and use its evil powers to become the next Dolly Parton. Light horror, lots of camp. I thought I could rework it into a Novella and it would be a fun project.

 They didn’t like the pitch, which was fine. The thing that bothered me was that in his response the editor said one of my main characters; a detective out to keep the brain slug from eating anyone, was “just being nosy.”

Wondering if I was overreacting I floated the offensive note to a friend who is also an author. “Ugh, it’s like, would he have said that if it was a male character though?” She instantly replied. Good question.

I got curious and decided to take a look at this publishers back catalogue. There were some female authors in there, two out of ten. Guess how many of them wrote stories with a male main character? All of them.

The other day I sent a television pilot I wrote to a friend. “Um, did you realize there are no men in this?” He said as if he was pointing out a critical error. I did realize, because I wrote it.

A while ago I decided that in my stories men get to do what women have been doing in stories since the beginning of time, which is die or be hot. Or be hot while dying, or die in a hot way. So, if I think of a character and he’s not a love interest or monster food he’s getting gender swapped and the story literally never suffers. In the case of the brain slug story the main characters were three women (one of whom is a very nosy detective) and a non-gender identifying brain slug that mainly takes female hosts.

I can’t say for sure that this was the main reason they rejected my idea. Like I said, I don’t usually write horror and they felt the pitch was a little light on gore, and a little too funny. They said that they wanted it to be less about female friendship and more about a brain slug feeding on people, which, fair.

It just made me really consider the fact that there’s a difference between wanting a female writer and wanting a female perspective. We’re in a time right now where companies know they’re supposed to want female writers but, I think, rarely want a female perspective.

Change is a scary thing in any industry and inclusivity is a BIG change for the media industry. When you’re pitching a project, you’re supposed to compare it to other shows that were already made in the past. It’s Ghostbusters meets Field Of Dreams! So if you’re doing something that’s maybe a little weirder and harder to define that’s always going to be difficult for any writer, but I think more so for women, and also people of color, that might be telling stories companies aren’t going to take as seriously for a bevy of reasons they won’t advertise.

This is all to say, when a company says they’re seeking female writers it’s ok to be skeptical. Look at their backlog; don’t just take them at their word. Time is the most important resource for a freelancer and don’t waste yours pitching to a company that says it wants to work with women when what it means is it wants to work with women who write like men. 

5 Things I Learned My First Year As A Freelance Writer

I’ve been a freelance writer for a year and a half now. Sometimes I think about what I wish I could tell a past version of me that’s just getting started. I have lots of online writing friends but I rarely ask them for advice even when I want to. I guess that’s because I worry a lot about bothering people. I’m from the Midwest where most babies first words are “excuse me”. So, I thought I would lay out some of what I’ve learned over the last year in hopes that it might help other budding writers who are afraid of their friends out. I also included an email at the end where you can ask me any other specific questions you might have. Ok this intro is getting a little long so I’m cutting here because…

1.) You Have To Be Your Own Quality Control

 I haven’t written anything good in a while. The ability to discern the quality of your own works is both a blessing and a curse. One of the reasons I got back into writing again was a piece of advice I heard from Ira Glass. He said, “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.”

I had to give myself permission to be bad, or worse mediocre to be able to write. You can pop out a list of top ten cheeses you’ve had sex with every day pretty easily but is it unique? Is it entertaining? Ok, cheese fucking was a bad example because there’s obviously a very niche audience that would be really interested in that but hopefully you get my point.

You’re selling your unique voice as a freelance writer so you have to develop that voice on your own and you have to decide what you’re going to use it for. This is really hard because no one else can really help you with it, you have to figure out essentially who you are or at least who you want people to think you are before you even get started.  A good editor can help shape your voice for their publication but hopefully you won’t be working for just one publication. The hardest part once you find that voice is keeping it while shifting to fit the tone of multiple publications.

 2.) Don’t Be Afraid To Take Up Space (Laaaadddiiiieeeeessss)

 The other day I wanted to submit to a website that I knew a writer I work with at another site does some editing on. I thought maybe I should reach out to her but then I thought no I don’t want to bother her, or for people to say I just got the job because I know her. Then I thought of an especially pushy male writer I know. He’s not a bad guy just a hustler, for brevity’s sake lets call him Craig.

 Whenever I have a career opportunity now and my instinct is that it would be rude to take it I ask myself would Craig do this? Pro-tip the answer is always yes. Craig will always do the thing. Women are raised to make sure everyone else in the room is comfortable before we sit down. Kill that part of yourself. Kill it and bury it and piss on its grave. I’m not saying be an asshole. I’m saying if someone asks “who wants to…” and you want to, don’t wait and see if anyone else wants to first. Raise your hand.

Also, use your connections. Don’t make friends with people just because they work somewhere or something that’s obviously gross but if you think someone you’re friends with can help you out ask them and more often than not they’ll do whatever they can for you. Sometimes they can’t do anything and that’s fine, you’re still buds. Have you ever asked anyone for help and had them say no and then never speak to you again? This has never happened to me but I feel like it’s going to every single time I ask for help. 

In my case the writer/editor I talked to was very nice, gave me great pointers, and sent my pitch directly to the editor of the appropriate section with a recommendation for me. I still got rejected! Which is the perfect transition to…

 3.) Get Ready For Pain Baby

I know you know there will be rejection if you want to be a writer, I’m not telling you anything revolutionary there. Here’s what they don’t tell you about the rejection. It’s pretty much always right and that’s the hardest part. You’re not Tina Fey or Neil Gaiman, and the odds that you’re going to grow into a writing genius are on par with you becoming a time traveling Elvis impersonator.

 If you’re lucky enough to get a good editor they won’t just say “no thanks” or “this doesn’t work for us.” They will systematically take every point of what you said and explain either why its wrong or how it can be better. You’re going to meet lots of people that are way better at writing than you and you have two options. You can learn from them or you can never speak to them again and quit writing forever. I’m making this sound like the choice is easy but it’s actually really not.

It’s not the no that hurts it’s the three hours of research down the drain. It’s the really good 15th century fart joke you couldn’t possibly work into another article. It’s learning that your opinion is not only wrong but it’s nuclear wrong, a kind of wrong that is more than wrong and only exists in the world of freelance writing.

 4.) Also Some Incredible Earth Shattering Loneliness

 I have never been so lonely in my entire goddamn life. When people say I’m lonely I always used to think that meant horny because I couldn’t even imagine the kind of loneliness I have experience the last year and a half. When I worked in HR I hated some of the morons I worked with. Now I want to pay a moron to just come be a moron at my house for a while. Please come over to my house and complain to me that the girl who sits behind you has weird feet and shouldn’t be allowed to wear sandals to work. Please.

 I think a lot of people who work from home experience this but I also think it’s worse for writers because you’re so in your own head all the time. You examine your own thoughts too much and it makes you neurotic. Or, at least that’s what it’s done to me. Maybe you are a champ who can handle it without talking to your dog and then also worrying that your dog hates you. If so please tell me your secret.

For the love of God make some friends if you’re going to become a freelance writer. The tricky thing is you’re going to have to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your entire life but the work is deceptive because it feels like fun so why ever stop working? It’s good to work a lot and working is fun so why not just keep working forever? The answer is because you will eventually have a mental breakdown. You’ll feel fine, maybe even great, until all of a sudden you won’t anymore and you’ll start to feel awful really fast and if you’ve ditched all of your friends or your new true love, working yourself to death, you’ll regret it. I’ve seen this happen to multiple people all over the Internet.

 5.) There Are So Many People Out To Just Straight Up Steal Your Money

 The fun thing about calling yourself a writing coach is anyone can do it. It’s a title that doesn’t come with a list of qualifications but is always followed by a list of prices. For anywhere from 20 to 200 dollars per hour people whose qualifications are ???? will give you all the advice they learned from somewhere, presumably, a person they paid 20 dollars maybe? I like to imagine Internet writing advice is a long game of telephone that has become so distorted over time that what you end up getting is something like character development is a pizza shark of whining! 

 I took a free class once from a writing coach. It was thirty minutes of her trying to sell her inspirational book about her life story, followed by ten minutes of advice on outlining that you could learn in any high school creative writing class, then fifteen minutes of what you would get if you paid for more classes.

 When I started out as a freelance writer I had a mentor, a really good mentor. I never would have stuck with it without him. I have no idea where I want my career to go now and most days when I try to picture what I should do next I end up just getting paralyzed and doing nothing which is the absolute worst thing I could possibly do.

 I’m not a super successful writer but I’ve done some stuff now. I had a regular freelance gig on one site, now I have a pretty steady gig on a new and upcoming site that I absolutely love. I have a short story published in a real physical book that I didn’t pay to print, and in fact I got paid to write it! I sold a Novella to a publisher but they closed down before it was a released. I wrote a second Novella and am shopping it around now. So those are my qualifications and here is my price $0.

 I set up an email account just for this purpose, Lydiagivesfreewritingadvice@gmail.com. If you’re a writer (especially a lady writer) and want to know if a certain outlet has a good reputation for paying on time or treating women well email me. If I don’t know the answer I’ll ask around. If you have a short story or an excerpt from a book that you would like a second pair of eyes on email me! (Lets keep it less than 7,000 words please).  If you just want a pep talk about writing email me. I may have just made writing sound a little terrible but you probably already know why it’s great and if I can help you improve even a little that would make me very happy!

What I Learned About My Writing Process By Writing My Novella

I’m done! I did it! Yay! People who hate exclamation points are curmudgeons. Suck on my exclamations nerds! I wrote a whole ass Novella. This is a big accomplishment to me for a lot of reasons. I’ve only finished one other Novella and it took me much longer, and was a much worse quality which is why I never released it.

I see people asking authors about their writing process all the time and I’ve never really read an answer to “what is your writing process” that I liked with the exception of Steven King’s wonderful and well-titled book On Writing. I thought it would be fun to lay out as best as I can what my process was for writing this novella, what my writing process is in general, and what I learned from tackling this project.

 Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

 My Grandma asks me this after every article I write. It’s a hard question to answer, where do  any ideas come from? I recently wrote an article for Bunnyears.com called “What Your Favorite Celebs Eat In A Day: Hint It’s Mostly Candles”. I got the idea for that from my unnatural desire to eat a Yankee Candle mixed with the thought that celebrities get to do all of this cool stuff normal people can’t. One day I thought if I could do anything with no consequences I would probably just eat an entire Yankee Candle. Not murder someone, not slap the president, not even rob a bank, I would eat a Yankee Candle. What is wrong with me you ask? I have no idea, but I realized that eating candles is funny and a celebrity doing it is even funnier so the article was born.

 The idea for my Novella came from an unusual building that’s on the way to a park where I sometimes used to roller skate with my friends. It’s an old U.S. Naval training building that was constructed in 1948 and It’s designed to look like a boat. I love old unusual architecture. I often look at places like that and wonder why on earth their empty.

 New buildings are going up in Nashville all the time and none of them are half as interesting as this old place. That sort of got my wheels spinning about old buildings and what kind of person might want to rent them and refurbish them and what kind of ghosts they might find there. I didn’t want to write a traditional ghost story though, so I tabled the idea for a while and let it simmer. Then I got the idea for a sci-fi story that was sort of hiding in a ghost story and I pulled that old building off the back burner. It got a redesign in the book it isn’t boat shaped because that didn’t fit the story I wanted to tell but that’s where the spark came from.

 I use my notes app on my phone to jot down story and article ideas that can pop up anytime. Then when I have free time or when I’m looking for something to write about I sort through them. If I keep passing over one a lot I’ll delete it or throw it into a long term projects file I have.

Writing Process

 Once my writer brain has filed something away, combined it with something new, and created an original idea I get started on a draft. Now this is where I think it’s important to say I agree with Steven King that everyone’s process is different and you just have to experiment a lot to find what works for you. So remember this is my process and maybe it’s something you’d like to give a shot if you have no idea where to start writing but if it doesn’t work for you that’s great. It means you can cross it off the list and try another method. You’ve learned something and that’s awesome!

 So with whatever I write my first draft is a total sloppy copy. I like to think of it as a burst of pure emotion, just feelings, no grammar. Grammar is stressful for me because I have a learning disability in written language.

 The first time I tried to write a book I went in and rewrote each chapter over and over again until it was perfect before moving on to the next chapter. Then I got frustrated when I wanted to add story elements later on that changed previous perfect chapters. This was a huge mistake for me.

 When I write articles I do a sloppy copy so sloppy sometimes I’ll just have a note that says A DICK JOKE GOES HERE. With my Novella I did write an outline first which was so essential for me. I feel like a real idiot for hating outlines before. I had this weird, hippy, idea that the story needed to just shape it’s self as I wrote it and, yeah that’s not a thing, at least not for me.

 After the sloppy copy of my Novella was complete I printed it out and read it. This helped me figure out that I had some pretty wild pacing issues that needed to be addressed. Pacing is something I don’t feel like a lot of young authors think about and it’s so important especially in writing something spooky/suspenseful. I moved a few chapters around, add more character detail at the beginning of the book to better highlight their growth at the end and I have my official rough draft!

 Editing Process

 This is the hardest part for me. Letting my precious shiny baby out into the world. The first person I sent my Novella to was my Dad and he caught a lot of the spelling mistakes, grammar issues, and left out words, that are the signature of a Lydia Bugg piece. When I was born my Dad became both a father and a copy editor on the same day and he didn’t even know it!

 After my Dad caught the really bad stuff I sent it to trusted friends and family members who agreed to beta read it for me. I also asked a few of my colleagues whose opinions I highly value to take a look at it. As I’ve gotten their feedback I’m making changes and polishing it up once again before I move on to the next step.

 Publishing Process TBD

I know nothing about publishing. I was thinking of self-publishing this just as a fun short piece for ninety nine cents on Amazon or something. My Aunt made me a lovely cover (pictured up top) and I figured if I put it up around Halloween I could get some people interested in a quick spooky read to pick it up. However, since I was writing this partially as an experiment to teach me about writing a full book I think I’m going to shop it around a little to some small publishers. Even if it gets turned down by everyone I’ll still learn a lot from the process.

So I might have some more updates for you eventually, who knows! Until then keep an eye out for my first published short story in the Eclectically Magical series from Inklings press in November! Yeah I’m still exclaiming. I’ll exclaim all fuckin day if I want!

I'm writing a novella!

So, If you listen to my podcast (Self Pub'd available on Soundcloud) you've probably heard me mention a time or two that I've been trying to write a book forever and it's really frustrating. I think part of whats holding me back is fear of publication. When I write an article if someone doesn't like it, it's not such a big deal because I've got another one coming out in a few days. A book just feels so much more permanent and personal. 

I have, however, had success in publishing a 30,000 word novella. What convinced me to look more seriously at a writing career was winning a novella writing contest from a very small publishing company. I wrote it in about two months, edited for a month, turned it in and won the contest and a publishing contract! Unfortunately shortly after I signed my contract the company closed forever. 

It was a science fiction YA story called Cosmic Pizza about a small Alaskan town where an immortal scientist was experimenting on the population. It had some cool ideas that I might recycle someday into something else and a really cool ending but I don't want to return to it. I've grown A LOT as a writer in the three years since I wrote it and I would have to tear the whole thing apart and start mostly from scratch. I would like to write another novella though, and I want to self publish it to get over my fear of putting something out there. 

A book takes years of patience, tons of rejections from agents, and then years of editing before it actually reaches an audience. I think the best thing I can do is take a deep breath and jump in with something quick and fun that I'm proud of.

I've started working on a horror/science fiction novella that I plan to finish writing in August, edit in September, and release in mid-October for maximum halloween spookyness. I'm not in love with a title yet, but this is the synopsis:

After leasing an unusual building to house their tech startup two female entrepreneurs feel strangely compelled to begin building a mysterious and possibly dangerous machine.

I'll keep posting updates and cover art, etc... as it gets closer to my release date. I'm mostly posting this now for accountability, so thanks for being my accountabilibuddy. I also have my first published short story Jane Quits Inhuman Resources coming out this November in the Eclectically Magical collection from Inklings Publishing.  It's going to be a busy fall so look out for lots of big projects coming from the house of Bugg!