Re-Introducing The Fractured Mirror and First and Last 2.0

When I was laid off from The Dissolve about five and a half years ago and found myself without salaried employment in pop culture media for the first time since my early twenties I salvaged my career by re-inventing myself as a columnist. 

I meekly asked The A.V Club if I could write my signature column My World of Flops for them and sold a pair of columns (The Simpsons Decade and Sub Cult 2.0) to Rotten Tomatoes that they were VERY excited about before they completely lost interest. 

In 2015 and 2016 I had so many columns that I couldn’t keep track of just how many there were but if I had to ballpark it, it’d be something in the area of twelve or thirteen. That's a lot! It was enough, in fact, to allow me to continue to make a living and support my family as a writer as a full-time freelancer. 

Then something VERY predictable if deeply unfortunate happened. I started to lose columns. Sometimes I would end a column of my own accord but it was far more common for a freelance outlet to end my columns.

The cancellation of My World of Flops by the A.V Club hurt the most but proved fortuitous because it coincided with the birth of this website. I was able to take my signature column to my new home, one hell of a consolation prize.

Usually when a column is cancelled, I feel a powerful combination of sadness and rage. But when I discovered that TCM Backlot, a website I have written a pair of columns (First and Last, a series on the debut and final film of prominent directors, and The Fractured Mirror, a series on movies about movies) for since going freelance in 2015, would be going out of business, I felt very different emotions. 

Instead of anger, I was filled with appreciation that my wonderful editor Yacov had provided me with a half-decade of regular income and unfailing support. Yacov is what my people call a consummate mensch: a terrific human being I feel blessed to know and work with. 

It sucked to lose my final two remaining outside columns but the blow was softened considerably by Yacov’s kind offer to let me re-run my First and Last and Fractured Mirror articles on this site. 

As a father and small businessman I need money and regular income, of course. TCM Backlot gave me those for five wonderful years, which I appreciate. But I need time and content as much, if not more than I need cold, hard cash. 

Being able to run First and Last and The Fractured Mirror on the Happy Place gives me time and it gives me an enormous amount of high quality content. I wrote sixty six Fractured Mirror pieces on some of the greatest movies ever made and some of the worst. I wasn’t as prolific with First and Last, in part because it involved twice the work, but there are thirty or thirty five of those articles as well. 

That means that if I run a First and Last or Fractured Mirror article once a week, as I intend to do, then I will have two solid YEARS of primo articles to share with y’all. 

The production schedule for the Happy Place is so demanding and exhausting that I’m lucky if I’m able to work a week ahead. So I cannot tell you how excited I am to be able to enter articles into the system that won’t run until early 2024. 

What will I do with all the extra time? Well, I hope to start an email list. That’d be pretty fucking great! But I also plan to use it to work on my 2022 book, which could very well be based on The Fractured Mirror. 

The end of TCM Backlot makes me sad but this dark cloud has one hell of a silver lining and I couldn’t be more excited about the glorious beginning of the First and Last and Fractured Mirror era of the Happy Place, which begins next month. 

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

and of course you can buy signed copies of The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al directly from me cheep here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from Amazon here

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