Maxim Article!

  So after many days of incompetence, I can finally share my Maxim article with all of you (Behold the Glory!). All thanks go to my dear friend Brian Hickey for taking the time to get my article scanned in HD. Now that's friendship! I also have to give another big shout out to the illustrator of the piece, a Mr. Am I Collective. I've never actually met the man before, but I have no doubt that his hilarious and awesome drawing brought much more attention to the article than if it had just been my boring text.

 In sadder news, I am afraid I have failed already in my objective to bring the goods on Fridays. The story I am working on is just not where I want it to be so I've decided to push it back to next Friday. BUT, all is not lost, because I do have another story to share with you today. Well, it's not so much a story as an embarrassing admission (shocking, I know), one that I promised myself I would keep to myself until the day I died. But considering I have failed you, and considering that the story is pretty topical, I suppose I will just have to be the bigger man here and tell you.

   So remember that Maxim article I wrote? Well, let me quickly give you the series of events that lead up to that moment. It all started four years ago when I lucked into getting an internship at Stuff Magazine (that in itself was an incredible experience filled with great stories that will be showing up in this blog soon enough, have no doubt) and ended up befriending several hilarious people that worked for the magazine. One of these people ended up going to Maxim.

At some point he came across my blog and liked what he saw. So he suggested I pitch him some ideas for the magazine. (And my friends said nothing would come from writing a blog. Fools!) Anyways, I pitched him five ideas a few days later. Heard nothing back. So I pitched another five ideas a couple weeks after that. Still nothing. So now I'm working on my third batch of ideas when I get a call from my mom. We chat a little and I tell her I'm trying to think of some good pitches for Maxim. She says she'll try to think of something good and get back to me. I say OK, thinking my mom has really lost it if she thinks she can suddenly help me with my writing career.

Then my mom calls back a couple hours later and tells me she has a great idea for a pitch. "What about," she says in her total mom voice, "an article about living back at home with your parents?"

I consider this for awhile. It's not bad, I think to myself, but I can't use a pitch I got from my mother, surely I can think of a better one myself. 

And wouldn't you know it, I did! I came up with this totally awesome idea for an article about living at home with your parents. And, as you know, that was the pitch that Maxim chose. So it just goes to show, you don't need your mom to help you get published in a magazine. You don't need her help at all.

In all seriousness, I can't deny how hilarious it is that the biggest achievement, by a large margin, in my writing career happened because of my dear sweet mother and her not-too-bad ideas. Love you, Mom.

As for the rest of you, feel free not to tell anyone about this, and I'll see you on Tuesday, enjoy the weekend!