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On logging onto TikTok and immediately crumbling into dust

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Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on TikTok. I started using the app regularly while researching my Washington Post article since all of the cosplayers I spoke to said they had started or increased their usage on TikTok during the pandemic. But there’s no work excuse for why I continue to spend an hour a day scrolling through funny cosplay videos. 

It’s uncanny how quickly the TikTok algorithm figured out what I wanted on my feed. My corner of TikTok is like an anime con masquerade that continues for 24 hours a day. I love this in-character Sk8 the Infinity barbeque, which turns a hangout into performance art. I’m in awe of this cosplayer who adjusts their look and body language to recreate a dozen Danganronpa characters in one video. I’m hooked on cosplay transformation videos that distill the sheer amount of time it takes to get into costume to a second or two, timed effortlessly to music. 

But every time I use TikTok, I’m also barraged with reminders of my age. “Minor, DNI [Do Not Interact]” is a common user profile descriptor. There’s a meme where young teenagers search a relative’s home for “vintage” manga, and based on my own manga collection, I might as well be that relative. More overtly, here’s a woman born the same year as me pretending to die of old age, though her presence on the app conversely shows that there are still older users! Goth Dad is one of my favorites. But I’m not seeing things: according to Statista, 50% of TikTok users worldwide are 34 or younger, and over 25% are 19 or younger. (Still, I wouldn’t put too much stock in these statistics dividing male and female users, since so many of the videos recommended to me are produced by nonbinary creators.) 

This is what categorizes my enjoyment of TikTok into a decidedly guilty pleasure. It’s time to admit that I am old and out of touch. This is a huge reason I have not been blogging anymore: my current life is so removed from my presumed audience that nothing that I feel like writing about feels like something my current readers would care about. 

When I launched Otaku Journalist, I was 22. My graduate school professor said we each needed to reserve a domain name in order to launch our careers as journalists. I initially started this blog under my real name and kept it general in order to appeal to more potential employers. After a few months, I leaned into my niche, limiting the number of jobs I could get, but also choosing to specialize in my preferred subject. You know the rest: this choice has led to bigger and bigger opportunities to cover fandom, including TV interviews and a book deal. 

All the while, I’ve written this blog with my 22-year-old self in mind. Some parts of my early career are still relatable, like my job at the Daily Dot churning out 16-20 articles a week. Other parts, like my relatively harassment-free internship for video game site Kotaku, are less so. Believe it or not, my reporting jobs in the ‘10s required me to interact in the comments section or on social media. In today’s environment of organized online abuse against journalists, that’s wildly unrealistic! There are distinct modern challenges that I never faced back then. 

But to add another barrier between me and this expected audience, I am not even working right now! I lost many of my freelance positions during the early days of the pandemic, as well as any interest I had in putting my daughter in daycare. That was a valid excuse for a while, but now that daycares are back open and my county is 70% vaccinated, I have to face the truth: I don’t want to go back to work yet. Of course, I do work: I don’t want to erase my around-the-clock labor to care for a toddler and manage a household, but it’s definitely a divergence from the career path I used to blog about. Writing and blogging used to be what I did during work hours, and now I do them in my free time, when Eva is asleep. In a way I’ve come full circle back to when I was 23, working in an office 9 to 5 and writing Otaku Journalist posts at night. 

When I was 23, jobs in fandom barely existed. Now, opportunities to turn fandom into your job are abundant, but the environment in which they exist is increasingly hostile. The internet is bigger, more public, and less forgiving than it used to be. I understand what it’s like to exist online now as an adult, but not what it would have been like to grow up this way. Rather than try to talk to young people about what I think they’re going through, I’m trying to listen to them.  

At the bottom of this epiphany is probably that I need to make a much-needed update to this website. I haven’t really made updates since 2017, and it’s incredible how much the web has changed in 4 years. If you’re doing one of my free courses or reading one of my ebooks in 2021, remember that this advice is coming from a different time. I’m not planning on deleting stuff (yet); I don’t think realizing that I’m old and out of touch means I have to fade into obscurity. But it certainly means I could stand to acquaint myself with fresh perspectives before I create something again.

How I wrote my first article for the Washington Post

As my friend Samantha of Anime Herald said, “Strange times breed strange opportunities.” Anyway, today I’m sharing my first article in the Washington Post. 

All dressed up with nowhere to go: Cosplaying in the pandemic ran today in Launcher, the Post’s video game vertical. I even wrote the headline! As is par for the course with a major news outlet, I had to begin on the ground level for a general audience, so Otaku Journalist readers may encounter details in it that seem obvious to fans. I’m glad, at least, that the social media team didn’t do me dirty the way the New Yorker made Matt Alt’s life difficult earlier this week. (That tweet, about how anime is “finally mainstream,” was deleted after major criticism, but you can get the gist of what happened from Mike Toole’s QRT.)

I found out about this opportunity on Twitter, which is the same place I have found out about basically every other gig in my career, which is why I still show up there every day and allow randos to yell at me. It’s been years since I reached out to the Post with one of my own pitches, but this time my area of expertise—cosplay, in this case—matched up with what editor Mikhail Klimentov wanted to feature. 

I worked on it for the better part of two weeks at the end of May and beginning of June. With four interviews and more than 1500 words, it contains my most serious reporting since Eva was born. I do most of my work during her nap and after bedtime, and that’s when I conducted the interviews for this article. But I needed help finding time to cobble the narrative together, so I’m grateful to John and my parents for watching Eva during several consecutive mornings. In my experience, mid-mornings are naturally my most productive hours, when I used to get my best writing done, but as a stay-at-home mom, I usually don’t have access to them anymore. 

Once I did have time to work, I found that my writing stamina was shot. I simply was no longer used to sitting down and writing 500 words at a time anymore! (My weekly Fruits Basket review, which is almost stream-of-consciousness, doesn’t count.) I broke through that wall with a free site called Pomofocus.io, which is based on the Pomodoro Technique. I would work for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, and repeat one or two or three more times, depending on how much time I had. I also found out that it can also be motivating to know that you only have a limited window of childcare. When you know your time is that limited, you are less likely to waste time writing and rewriting the perfect sentence. Just stick in a placeholder and revise later. 

I don’t want to burn any bridges so I don’t want to tell you what they paid me (though you can Google their freelancer pay rates pretty easily), but I spent enough time on this that my pay-per-hour rate is laughable. The real benefit was writing for a major paper of record about our fandom in a way that I hope does it justice. It was also incredible to have access to the Post’s photo team for what turned out to be a very visual story. Most of the story revolves around three cosplayers in the Bay Area (Tatted Poodle), the NYC Metro area (Maweezy), and Atlanta, Georgia (Yaya Han), and the Post sent photographers to all three locations! 

Growing up as an aspiring journalist in the DC area, it’s always been a goal of mine to write for the Washington Post. I didn’t expect this to happen at a time when I’ve all but abandoned my career to hang out on playgrounds all the time, but here we are! It feels great to be writing again, and I hope you’ll see more bylines from me soon. 

Lead image: Maweezy in her incredible “Boba” Fett cosplay, photographed by Melanie Landsman for The Washington Post

Not According to Keikaku

Today is my birthday so I’m feeling self-indulgent enough to finally update my blog. I’m doing about as well as anybody could be in this terrible year. Each day I wake up with a primary goal: keep my daughter alive and mostly in one piece. Everything else is secondary. 

This is all very much Not According To Keikaku, as the saying goes. I never planned to leave my career behind in order to be a stay-at-home-mom, but I never planned for a global pandemic either. Back in February, I wrote about learning to balance being a mom with client work. As the pandemic has dragged on, most of those clients have let me go or even closed up shop. Instead of doubling down on the work that I was still lucky enough to have, I instead did the bare minimum. I will be lucky to break $15k in income this year, which is much less than a year’s worth of childcare costs in my area. Combined with /gestures at everything/, John and I decided that it made more sense for me to parent Eva full time until the pandemic is over. 

It’s staggering how quickly I’ve forgotten who I used to be. I mentioned to a parent friend that I used to write books while our toddlers played on the playground, and I almost couldn’t get the words out, felt like I was having delusions of grandeur. Did I write books? Did I ever write anything longer or more in-depth than a grocery list? It feels like that was someone else’s life. 

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we become what we practice? After a few months of being primarily a parent, I feel like that’s all there is to me. But in reality, this year I did lots of self-actualizing stuff while Eva was sleeping. Things like:

It’s a shorter list than usual, but getting anything done this year is a win. This was a year in which I only knew what day it was by which of my weekly anime episodes or webtoon updates went live. This was a year full of misfortune both public and personal, one in which I have experienced levels of world-weary, bone-deep fatigue like never before. I’m just glad to have made it to age 34, even if I can’t celebrate it like I usually would. 

If you’ve made it this far, I just wanted to let you know that I priced down my workbook and books to $0.99 or less. (I’m working to make my books cost $0 on Amazon, but Kindle doesn’t make it easy so I need to jump through a few more hoops first.) It’s not much but I’d like to increase their accessibility at a time when so many things feel more difficult than they should be. Thanks for reading and for supporting me, whether you’ve been reading for one post or all 912 (yes, really). And hang in there. My birthday is the darkest day of the year, and I’ve always gleaned hope from the unchanging fact that after today, the days will get lighter. They really will. 

Lead photo by Nikhita Singhal

5 Tips For Breaking Into Niche Writing In 2020

how-to-break-into-niche-writing-2020

It’s been difficult to find the motivation to blog. As quarantine wears on, my role as a primary caregiver has continued on as the most important and time-consuming part of my life. The traditional gender roles I conveyed in my May post have only become more stark as John’s career gets demanding while I continue to drop work I no longer have time or energy to do. 

“It’s awful,” I said to my sister about my quarantine life with an increasingly mobile toddler. “All we do is eat, nap, and play with blocks all day. I’m losing my mind.” 

“That sounds like fun actually,” she pointed out. Maybe complaining about all-day playtime to a very busy and in-demand employment lawyer wasn’t my smartest move. 

Since that conversation, I’ve tried to embrace my new life as a storybook reader, block stacker, and nursery rhyme singer. Like everything else about this quarantine, it feels like it’s gone on forever. So when, every now and then, I get a request for advice, it jolts me back into who I used to be—a niche journalist with ten years of experience reporting on anime, tech, and fandom. 

Like I say on my about page, “my favorite part of [this blog] is getting to connect with students and give them the advice I wish I had received.” That’s truer now than it has ever been. As somebody who launched my own career against the gloomy backdrop of the 2009 recession, my heart goes out to anyone getting their start during such a bleak time. 

I ought to permanently affix “Sorry for the late reply” as a heading to all of my quarantine correspondence, but I have slowly been offering advice to students and young professionals who ask. With their permission, I’ve included some of it here:

1) Get Gigs By Giving Editors Ideas

Not only is it a tough time to break into the field, it’s a tough time to be in the field. Though online ad revenue is down, more people are stuck at home and reading news outlets than ever, so clicks are way up and editors need stories for people to read. Just from hanging out on Twitter, I’ve seen requests from places like Crunchyroll News, Funimation, and Anime News Network that are putting out calls for story pitches because they need new content. 

If I were looking for gigs, I’d be reaching out to these places with story ideas I’d be ready to write for them ASAP. In a cold email, I don’t even think a portfolio of samples is as important as a well-written email with an interesting pitch and the intent to back it up with quick, solid work. It’s less about researching what makes a good story pitch in general, and more about studying previous stories at those outlets and suggesting a story you can write for them that’s both in their wheelhouse and not something they’ve covered in the past. 

2) Pitch The Stories You Want To Read

Is there anything in your preferred beat that you think isn’t getting good coverage? Do you think you have an interesting idea for an in-depth piece that’s not about immediate breaking news? Better yet, can you make a case for an article that only you could write, involving a personal angle or anecdotal experience? Best of all, can you tie an article idea to what’s going on in the world right now? These are all ways you could get your idea to pique an editor’s interest. 

I would write to a couple of your favorite niche outlets with one or two ideas (I’d go for quality over quantity, you really only need a single good idea) and see if anyone responds. And if nobody does, I would try smaller organizations next. In the videogame sphere, a good example would be that you’d pitch to, instead of Polygon, someplace like Rock Paper Shotgun. They’re actually a great place for this because their contributor guidelines (always read those first) say that you don’t need to have published work to pitch to them, just an example of prior writing.

3) Find Experts To Guide Your Niche Reporting

If you look at my career over the last ten years, it looks like I’ve covered a huge variety of topics. But actually, those topics all occurred in clumps. I’d be assigned a beat and I’d immerse myself in it. For example, when I was at ReadWrite, my editor came to me and said, “Lauren, I want you to become our Pinterest expert.” So I did. I signed up for an account when they went live, I went to their headquarters, I followed a lot of Pinterest influencers and kept tabs on them. This also happened with robots and smart homes at different times. 

These days, my beats are informed by my own interests. I write about anime and Magic: The Gathering for Forbes because I like that stuff and already know a lot of background. But any time I’m entering into something I know nothing about, I do a lot of research. For example, when I wrote about quantum computing, I first found and interviewed a quantum physicist. Look for guides in a new beat: people who know the topic way better than you do and can keep you from looking stupid. I don’t want to make insiders roll their eyes at something I write the same way I roll my eyes whenever a reporter writes “Sailor Moon: The Anime Nobody Has Heard Of.”

4) You Can Skip The Unpaid Work Step

Let’s talk about privilege for a moment. My parents paid for me to go to college, and my grandmother paid for me to go to grad school. (I also had scholarships for both but they would not have paid for all of my tuition, my books, etc.) This gave me more choices than the average student. So when I wanted to intern at Kotaku for no money, that was an option. When I wanted to intern at the Newseum for no money, I could do that. Kotaku, in particular, was huge for helping me build contacts in the games/pop culture writing space. But the world has changed. The Newseum closed and Kotaku now pays their interns. It used to be that you would “pay your dues” by working for free, but now that’s just called “being taken advantage of.”

Today, I suggest jumping right into freelance work instead of interning. Even though freelance gigs are frequently one-time, you can turn that into recurring work if you deliver good, consistent writing. And even if not, you can get big publication names in your portfolio. 

5) Never Stop Learning

I’ve always been interested in web design since middle school, though it started as a hobby. Then, when I got my Master’s in Journalism, technical training was a required part of the coursework. Even back then there was an understanding that journalism alone wasn’t going to pay the bills in the future, and journalists needed to be well-rounded. Of course you don’t need to go to grad school for this. You can use Lynda.com (I have a free membership with my library card and you might, too). One suggestion for honing your skills might be to set a productive goal: you could build your own website and use YouTube videos to help you along the way.

Over the years, I’ve worked on improving my skills whenever my justification for doing something a certain way was “This is how I’ve always done it.” That’s a bad reason. That’s when it’s time to start with a Google search and see how people are, for example, doing web security audits these days, and see if I need to get with the times. 

Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

Remembering Zac Bertschy

By now you have seen the news that Zac Bertschy has passed away. To me, Zac will always be the human embodiment of Anime News Network: the guiding voice of the publication. His work as managing editor on the predominant English language anime news site has been one of my biggest influences here on Otaku Journalist—and on my career at large. 

I’ve been working for Zac as a reviewer and occasional features writer for six years, but I actually started writing to him looking for work as early as 2012. I was one of hundreds of young fans vying for a position writing about anime, so he could afford to have very high standards for the caliber of people he hired. He finally agreed to hire me on a trial basis as a reviewer in 2014, according to my email correspondence with him. 

The tenuous nature of my trial status, paired with Zac’s legendary bluntness, made me particularly nervous around him at first. Zac wasn’t afraid to tell me if I wasn’t up to par. As I wrote in this blog post about my first season reviewing anime for ANN, “Did you know I had to rewrite my initial Free! Eternal Summer review THREE TIMES before it was ready to be published? Nobody likes a writer with an ego, so instead of balking I listened carefully to Zac and Jake’s suggestions and I haven’t made the same mistake twice.” As I improved, Zac would give me the occasional compliment which I would carry around with me like a gem. “Did you know Zac said I had a ‘talent for brevity?’” I told John at least three times. 

I’m not sure when our relationship shifted to that of equals, but when you email somebody multiple times a week for six years, you eventually get closer. Zac invited me on ANNCast twice, first to talk about sexism in anime, and later to talk about Gundam Wing, a show we disagreed about a lot! I always looked forward to spending time with him at cons. I remember chatting with him at Otabrew (an Otakon party purportedly about sampling new beers, where noted teetotaler Zac had water and Diet Coke instead) about becoming one of the old fans, while Zac, who is around five years older than me, told me about back when he was the youngest in his fandom set. It was incredible to imagine this man, who has entertained, inspired, and hired so many younger anime fans, as the brazen new otaku among the graybeards. 

I once asked Zac what advice he had for Otaku Journalist’s audience of aspiring anime career entrants and he said, “You need to be easy to work with.” Zac fit this to a T. He maintained a rarely-updated blog about his struggles with self-loathing. I’m sure he was dealing with a lot behind the scenes but he was always professional to his colleagues. Once when I was having difficulty keeping up with my review schedule, he and Jake set up a plan to let me scale back my output for a while because, he said to my shock, they’d rather have me on staff and working less than quit the site. His kindness extended beyond work, too. I’ll never forget how, when a close friend died unexpectedly in 2017, Zac sent me a condolence card in the mail. I was so touched that he’d take the time. 

During a time when writing for ANN was one of my wildest dreams, Zac gave me a chance. Zac, I wish I could go back in time and tell you again how thankful I am for the opportunity to write for the site you’ve shaped so thoughtfully. Rest easy, you’ve built an incredible legacy here. 

Lead photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

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