Sometime in 2001, when I was editing this once-glorious mp3 site and not realizing how sweet I had it for a 23-year-old, the wife of Daniel Handler (according to Wikipedia, her name is Lisa Brown) came into my ex-girlfriend’s hair salon. Daniel Handler is better known by his pseudonym, Lemony Snicket, and had just begun publishing his A Series of Unfortunate Events books, which would lead him to fame and fortune. He was also a Wesleyan graduate, as, coincidentally, I am too. So during the course of the haircut, the two women talked about him and they talked about me, and what I gleaned of the conversation when my ex-girlfriend got home amounted to “My boyfriend’s an aspiring writer,” “Oh really, I’m sure Daniel would love to help, here’s his email address.”

So I sent Daniel Handler an email, which in all likelihood offered very little indication of my potential greatness as a writer, and may in fact have been a bit whiny. In response, he gave me some slightly exasperated Career Counseling for Would-Be Writers boilerplate, no substantive advice, and a faintly ominous perspective on the business of writing generally. I was much too young to give him credit for responding at all, so I became a knee-jerk Lemony Snicket naysayer. Though I readily confessed to not having read any of his books, I was more than willing to make vaguely nasty comments about him, and I remember being not pleased at all when he did a reading before a Magnetic Fields show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, a few months after our exchange.

That was a long time ago, and while I’m certainly no Lemony Snicket (or Daniel Handler?), and never will be, I do know a few things now about the business of writing, or journalism, or editing, or magazines, or websites, or “the media,” or whatever it is. Namely, that it’s fairly brutal, and that the opportunities are few and far between. So the other day, when I was giving email advice to an aspiring writer hoping to move to New York, who’s about the same age as I was then, and I found myself making dreadful suggestions about finding an internship if it was at all financially feasible, or using his writing skills to get a job in marketing or publicity or nonprofits as a start at least, I thought of Daniel, or Lemony, and I felt bad for harboring ill will towards him. No matter how successful you are at it, I think any writer knows that writing for a living is a terrible business to get into, and the best advice you can give someone is to close your eyes, jump in, and hope for the best. It probably beats trying to be an actor anyway.