Matador Nights still wants you

Metal at the gay bar. This is what we need more of. Photo: rick

Sometimes something comes of it, sometime no. Still, if you’re reading this, maybe this message is meant for you.

When I started out at Matador, it was because Tom Gates found me at a Couchsurfing party in Buenos Aires entertaining people will my foul mouthed stories, bitching about how hard it is to get a writing job that pays anything at all, and puzzling over what I should do. He said, “I work for Matador. You can write an article for my page. Let’s work out some ideas.”

Now, Tom is kind of a genius in assessing people’s strengths (and also with his writing, but that’s for another article). He picked a topic for me and sent me on my way. I wrote what he asked and more. Tom’s idea for my writing crashed the website when the post went live. In the days leading up to that, I was at home, clicking refresh, refresh, refresh, thinking my first published piece would be up any minute, poking around Matador, seeing a community and articles that engaged me and got me thinking.

What happened was that I was (at least) a moderately talented writer with a good work ethic who ran into the right person, just when I was almost discouraged enough to stop looking for avenues to publish. It’s not easy out there, and I know that. If you’re reading this, and you know that you can write then I have a question for you. What the fuck are you waiting for?

In that spirit, I will tell you some things I would like to publish on Matador Nights at the moment. These are ideas for ongoing series that I would like to see blossom with writers, both experienced and inexperienced.

The [punk, grunge, electro, hardcore, battle, etc.] scene in [New York, Athens, Detroit, London, Buenos Aires, etc.] in the [decade]

The idea of the series above is spawned from a recent conversation with David Miller. He was telling me about the bands playing when he was a teenager in Athens, GA. It was a completely different scene than the Louisville punk, hardcore, rock and roll scene I was absorbed in as a kid. I am really interested in first person accounts of the pockets of music culture you grew up in, no matter where in the world it happened. This will be especially interesting if you were in a band, or even if you went to a lot of shows or were a super fan of one local band. If you think you are in the middle of one right now, that’s cool too.

Tour highlights [band/comedian X]

No matter what kind of band you’re in or your style of touring, if you can write scraps of place-based details about your tour, then do it. Then string them together and send them to me. Take a few snapshots, too. If you have any questions, just ask. This would also be great for a standup comedian out on the road.

Brush with fame

This is an ongoing series at Matador Nights. I’m not interested in fan-boy drooling or gushing unless it results in reflection or humor. I want interaction, observation, and wit. If your celebrity encounter didn’t really involve interaction and there’s not a lot to say about it, please save it for your personal blog.

Gay guide [Phoenix, Philadelphia, Cape Town, Bangladesh, etc.]

These should be pieces about where the boys or girls are in your town. I want more than the bar scene here. If there are creepy porno theaters, exclusive S&M clubs you have to be on a mailing list to get into, if there’s a gay coffee shop, or specific attractions you think would be of interest, anything can be included. Your gay guide may be completely different from the next guy’s. What I want is extemporaneous wit about the scene in your town as you see it. This should be very, very easy for the right person/people.

Marijuana Ambassador

I have been looking for someone to produce pot related content for so long. This is a hard position to fill, and perhaps if I could even just get one article, I’d have faith that pot-heads can follow through after all. I would hate for this to be written by someone who’s not really into weed all that much, but for some reason, what I generally end up with is a long chain of correspondence back and forth that includes about 25 pitches and no article is ever produced. For the gods’ sake, do not do this again. All I want is one tightly crafted pitch for an article about marijuana laws, customs, history, or culture. If I give the go ahead on that pitch, I want an article within a week or two that is along the lines we discussed. That is it.

That’s enough for now. If you don’t feel qualified to write any of the above posts, it’s not like we couldn’t use your voice here. Write a tightly crafted pitch – don’t get all nervous about it, just be coherent, hopefully at least a little witty, and write about a paragraph of what it is you have to say, and send it to me at kate[at]matadornetwork[dot]com.

Thanks for reading this. If this post was meant for you, maybe you’re even a little excited. Get to it and we’ll talk soon,

Kate