Rebooting the Runes Again

I used to have this idea that I could send humorous opinion pieces to magazines, get paid for them, and parlay that experience into a regular position as a columnist who writes humorous opinion pieces. This didn’t happen, of course. I sold a handful of essays at the rate of about one every two years, and at no time did an editor ever say “Hey, we like your stuff, why don’t you give us 500 words on Republicans or cat hair or something?”

Part of the problem was that I’ve never been a prolific essay writer. The rate at which I was writing humorous opinion pieces wasn’t that much greater than the rate at which I sold them. And yet I’ve always wondered what I could have done if my job had been to write humorous opinion pieces. Could I turn out five a week? Three? One? Would a paycheck be a good substitute for a muse?

We’ll never know. The idea of writing humorous essays for money was never a dream, only an idea, and has long since been abandoned. But I do still occasionally get the urge to write some wry commentary, and that’s why I started the Runes way back in 2005.

Looks like I’m averaging about eight-tenths of an essay per month since then. Probably about eight-tenths of a reader too.

And yet here we are again. We’re one week from the presidential election and I have some thoughts that are longer than the usual Facebook status. Let’s see what happens.