As always, the editors at Freshly Pressed Towers have enjoyed the sheer range and breadth of thoughtful, entertaining, or just plain challenging content you’ve been publishing to WordPress.com. Our Readers have seen everything from Cthulhu cookery to to grimdark feminism passing through, and as always, we’ve been more than impressed by the results.

If you’re looking for three stand out posts from this week’s selection, you might want to cast your eye over this week’s Friday Faves:

Fumbling For the Truth: The Freelancing Author, or Will I Ever Be Paid Again?

 . . . so let’s get back to the actual point: that writers are increasingly asked to exchange their services–whether to create entirely new content or to adapt previously published work–for nothing more than the opportunity to reach a larger, or different, audience.

If you’ve any interest in journalism, or writing for a living, you’ve probably seen the recent discussion raging around the issue of professional writers finding it increasingly hard to get paid for their work. Most recently, the controversy around The Atlantic‘s request to repurpose Nate Thayer’s work less any fee for his troubles has gathered a great deal of attention and generated a great many opinions.  In his post Fumbling For the Truth: The Freelancing Author, or Will I Ever Be Paid Again?, Aaron Riccio, a freelance writer, pens one of the most balanced appraisals of the problem facing freelance writers yet, while trying to unpick the causes from the symptoms, and offer possible solutions for a world where publications have dwindling budgets, but writers still need to put bread on the table.

It makes for a compelling, personal, and thoughtful examination of a sticky problem that doesn’t show any signs of going away soon. If you’re at all interested in writing, or just reading the kind of journalism that makes you think, you could do a lot worse than acquainting yourself with the debate through this well-balanced appraisal of the situation as it stands.

Hello, World

I have murdered countless innocents, even children. Armies have bowed before me. I have sown genocide across worlds. Worst of all, my atrocities entertained me.

With this captivating opening line, Matt Wrench of Score Not Found launches a brand new blog dedicated to indie games and gaming. His post serves as both a personal meditation on growing away from the limitations and limited focus of mainstream gaming, while also presenting a kind a manifesto for his blog, which is an attempt to break from the dominant shallow, vapid approach to video game journalism that trades in star ratings and one-liners. This winning combination of bildungsroman, manifesto, and exploration of what the author finds personally lacking in the games that captivated him as a younger player makes for a multifaceted post that’s as likely to appeal to the casual reader as it is the gaming aficionado. Whichever category you fall into, I urge you to give Hello, World a read.

Grokking Expatriates In Sci-Fi*

If you broaden the definition slightly of expatriate from country to planet, you can posit that the Doctor is actually an expat.   His homeworld is Gallifrey, a planet that is lost forever in time, but he spends an awful lot of time on Earth, hanging out with humans and generally getting involved with the culture.  That, my friends, is what an expatriate does.

While we’re on the subject of Hello, World, if you’re interested in a lighter, but magnificently geeky read, you may very well enjoy Grokking Expatriates in Sci-Fi*, a post, penned by an American abroad, dedicated to the expat experience, as seen through the lens of travellers from other worlds. If you’ve ever lived or travelled at length to another country, you’ve very likely experienced the feeling of having landed on an alien planet. Everything’s the same, but somehow different. Marry this idea to the ultimate in outsider fiction, Sci-Fi, and you have the makings of an amusing, and well-researched, geektastic odyssey through fictional ex-pats from Doctor Who to Ford Prefect, by way of *cough* John Spartan of Demolition Man. To say any more would spoil the fun, but if you have a few minutes spare and fancy a warp speed jaunt through Sci-Fi’s great outsiders, I think you’ll enjoy this post a lot.

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