Writing for Other People Is Weird

So, I've taken on a little no-money writing gig for a start-up blog out of New Zealand called Men's Domain. The site owner found me through Twitter and asked me if I would like to write a movie column of some sort, so I proposed "The DVD Cave," which would be a spotlight on movies that "real men" should have in their collection. So far I've featured The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Hard Boiled. It's a neat little thing, and even though I make no money at it, it makes me feel like professional writer to publish things on somebody else's website.

Here's the thing, though: it's really hard. Here on my own blog, I can vomit up words by the page and the only standards I have to meet are my own. But when I write for somebody else, I get all self-conscious, and my language gets weirdly formal, and the worlds wind up petering out way too soon. For instance, I should be able to write a few thousand words about The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly in my sleep; after all, it's one of my favorite movies. But for this other blog, I barely managed a page.

I keep telling myself that I'll eventually learn to relax and write as comfortably for other people as I do here in my own comfy corner of the blogosphere, but every time it's time to write a new DVD column, I procrastinate until the last moment, then quickly type up an awkwardly-written series of words that doesn't even communicate one tenth of the opinions I hold about the chosen film. Or, at least, it feels that way. I don't know how it reads.