• The always promotional Andy Cohen shills for his Real Housewives of D.C. series. It's deeper than you think? Right.
• Fellow Bravo spokeswoman Alex McCord was awake till 3am writing blogs. We saw her and Simon out earlier in the night at a U.S. Open-related event getting her drink on.
• Also at the event were Andy Roddick and John Legend, who apparently enjoyed FatBooth together. (FatBooth is an iPhone app that makes your face look 100 to 200 pounds fatter.) Brooklyn Decker (Roddick's wife) wasn't there, but she noticed the shenanigans that occurred. This happened before midnight, but I thought it ought to be shared.
• Social-media expert Rachel Sklar retweeted a funny comment about fashion faux pas.
• Idiosyncratic punctuater 50 Cent was tweeting up a storm, as is his wont. The two best ones: he rages against a "funky bitch," and then he calms down.

That's all I've got for today. Follow the Observer on Twitter, please. Thanks.

Less than a week after he announced he was launching a “global strategy firm” that would assemble a network of thousands of working journalists, bloggers, authors and ex-journalists, he was drowning in applications.

He’d made it easy, of course. The same day he announced his plans, he launched a Web site where anyone can pretty much apply to become an “expert” for the firm by simply submitting one’s background information and by checking off areas of media-related expertise, ranging from politics and sports to pharmaceuticals and video games.

Some five days later, according to Mr. Abrams, he has 650 applicants, the bulk of whom are freelance journalists, people who are writing books and individuals who have recently been laid off or walked away from jobs in the media industry.

“It’s a mix of TV, online media and print people,” said Mr. Abrams. “I think it’s somewhat equally weighted. Maybe a little bit more heavily toward TV. It’s everything from household names to producers to bloggers to people who have started their own online media entities.”

“That’s not bad for five days,” said Mr. Abrams.

He said that eventually he hopes to have some 20,000 experts in the database.

Recently, Jessica Pressler of New York magazine and Ryan Tate of Gawker (among others) have questioned the ethical implications of hiring working journalists to moonlight in public relations and media consulting. On Monday evening, Mr. Abrams seemed a touch testy about the criticism.

“There’s something a little bit offensive to me—as all these media organizations are cutting back so significantly on personnel—that people are out there saying, ‘Well, Dan Abrams shouldn’t be trying to help them find any work,’” said Mr. Abrams. “You know, give them a break.”

While Mr. Abrams continues to assemble his armada of media consultants, he is also brainstorming about the myriad services Abrams Research might perform in the future. “We’re thinking about media surveys,” said Mr. Abrams. “I think down the road, we’re going to be doing conferences. I’m still thinking of creative ways of harnessing all that talent and utilizing it.”

For the time being, the company is keeping the identity of its applicants under wraps. Mr. Abrams said it will be a few more weeks before the firm starts advertising the names of its star experts.

“I can tell you there are people in our database who are on-air network news personalities, who I would describe as household names,” said Mr. Abrams.

The Observer has learned that one former on-air news personality who will be joining the network as an expert is Rob Morrison—the onetime war correspondent for MSNBC and NBC News, who until recently anchored Today in New York. When reached by phone on Tuesday, Mr. Morrison (who left WNBC in May) confirmed that he would be participating in Mr. Abrams’ network.

“If he has the need for a former-Marine-slash-local-slash-network-news guy, I’d love to help him out, why not?” said Mr. Morrison. “This seems like the perfect kind of company where all these things can cohabitate together. Who knows what can come from it? In my mind, it seems like a great kind of petri dish.”

Consulting for the Abrams Network will be a part-time gig, with jobs determined on a case-by-case basis. Mr. Morrison, for one, will be keeping busy in the meantime. He recently finished writing a children’s book called Happy the Cat, and is shopping around for a publisher. Mr. Morrison said the book is about his wife and her cat (“technically, my step-cat,” said Mr. Morrison) and the bond they developed traveling around the country together as she switched from job to job early in her career. 

Mr. Morrison ventured that journalists in general are getting more used to the idea of not knowing what is next. “For a long time it was a very scary thing and probably still is for a lot of people,” said Mr. Morrison. “But everyone’s becoming more and more open to whatever is next. They have a gut instinct that the writing is on the wall—got to get involved with something different. And also, let’s face facts: There are a lot of out-of-work journalists right now.”

Before he contacted Mr. Abrams, he’d spent several years as a colleague of his at MSNBC.

“I know that whatever Dan puts his energy behind is going to be successful,” said Mr. Morrison. “A lot of other people have that feeling about it. That’s why they feel so good about tossing their hats in the ring.”

Another former journalist who The Observer has learned is tossing his hat in the Abrams Research ring is Chez Pazienza, the erstwhile CNN producer turned blogger and addiction memoirist.

Mr. Pazienza told The Observer on Tuesday afternoon that he thought Abrams Research was a clever idea and had applied to be an expert via the company’s Web site.

“You have to consider the state of media right now,” said Mr. Pazienza. “If you haven’t experienced massive layoffs or the threat of losing your job, you are very lucky. I now know at least 10 people, who are personal friends of mine, who are out of work, laid off.”

He said that over the past several days, he had talked with a number of his former colleagues in the television news business who were likewise considering signing up with Mr. Abrams.

“This kind of work would be really good,” said Mr. Pazienza. “It brings in some cash. I actually don’t think there is anything ethically wrong with it. … I had a friend who was a media consultant for a long time and now he’s back in television news. We move around all the time. It’s an incestuous business.”

“When you talk about consulting firms, a lot of time you get people who live in ivory towers—who haven’t really been doing TV or journalism or blogging in quite a while,” he added. “And so what they’re telling clients is really academic. What Abrams has done is put his clients in a position to talk to people who may not still be working now but who were working yesterday.”

The widespread interest is perhaps not too surprising in light of the bloodbath that has been washing through newspapers, magazines, book publishing, Web publishing and broadcast television in recent months and, along the way, throwing scores of talented journalists out of work.

Mr. Abrams was quick to note that his firm had a higher purpose than simply providing a paycheck for victims of the ongoing industry contraction. “What is very important to know,” said Mr. Abrams, “is that this is not an unemployment agency.”

fgillettte@observer.com

Gawker has the memo.

In a video Ms. Sklar posted on YouTube, the Eat the Press editor performs a parody of Don McLean's "American Pie" with Lisa Loeb. In lyrics she wrote herself, Ms. Sklar sings about the joys and fears of summer camp to co-promote the book Camp Camp and Camp Lisa, Ms. Loeb's latest CD.

(Weirdly, the first time this reporter ever heard of Ms. Loeb, was in the early '90s when she performed in a duo called Liz and Lisa at his camp in Wellesley, Mass., where Elizabeth Mitchell, Ms. Loeb's bandmate, was a counselor.)

Reached by gchat at the airport in Toronto, Ms. Sklar says that she's not pursuing a new career, but merely returning to an old one: "I was the head of theater at Camp Winnebago for four proud summers (and may have been the first person to mount a version of Grease Two, I'm just saying). ... I've been in plays and shows on the side all my life and before blogging I was doing a little sketch comedy stuff (nothing major). And I was in a musical-comedy weekly current events show in the summer of '05. For me, the most fun is to perform something I've written, like, in law school the highlight of the year was Law Follies."

Ms. Sklar admits to being nervous during the performance, but Ms. Loeb was "so nice and so generous onstage" that she managed to get through it with only one rehearsal and some notes from the singer-songwriter. Fans of Ms. Sklar's singing will have to wait for an album since none is forthcoming, but if she were to release one, the blogger/singer suggested her own title: The Happy Go-Lucky Canadian Blogger, This Time in Song.

Some of the critical outlets weren't surprising.

Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould's article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.

Gawker's first post officially linked to Ms. Gould's Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.

A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.

Sadly, another, about the article's photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.

Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.

New York magazine's Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel's math. One wonders how many I's and me's were in New York's equally controversial first person cover story this week.)

Perhaps the most surprising critic of Ms. Gould's work was The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar, in her Eat the Press posting Emily Gould: New Gloss On An Old Story. Ms. Sklar, whom Media Mob once described as having "an unusually sunny voice in the media-blog world," did not mince her words:

Ms. Sklar (who, in the interest of full of disclosure, mentions this writer by name in her post) concludes, "Gould is a talented writer and blogger, as evidenced by her continued presence in this sphere, but the NYT did her, itself, or really the blogosphere no favors in accepting this essay as a cover story." Ms. Sklar even points out a factual error in the piece and chides, "Way to fact check, NYT," reminding us of a certain kind of critical but helpful video like the one above.

But seriously. If Eat the Press is getting on your case (more or less), you must've done something bad. It's almost like Ms. Gould and The New York Times Magazine don't have a single friend in this town!

Then again, there's always Mediabistro's FishbowlNY, which gave Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati a chance to justify Ms. Gould's piece's existence.

Of course given that Mediabistro employs Ms. Gould as its publishing columnist, that's hardly too surprising. But it goes to show that when you work together, you can overcome pretty much anything. And that's one to grow on.

"I can't honestly say there is a direct link with being nominated and winning an award with doing better with ad sales," Mr. Townsend told Media Mob. He didn't know if there was "any currency" to these awards in terms of better business. "This is a night for the editorial team."

Ann Moore, the Time Inc. CEO, grabbed Mr. Townsend so he could say hello to Wenda Millard, the president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

"Don't you look swell? Don't you look swell!" said Ms. Millard. Mr. Townsend, wearing a blue to this black-tie event, smiled.

"Are you still the commodore of the New York yacht club?" she asked.

"I am."

"Oh, well because my son, he's at N.Y.U., he's very enthusiastic about sailing ..."

After that brief nautical detour, Mr. Townsend said the Condé Nast business team would celebrate upstairs in the Time Warner Center at Porter House. They had a 10 p.m. reservation.

Across the room, New York magazine's editor in chief, Adam Moss, was also talking about how a nomination, or should luck shine upon you, a win, impacts a magazine. "It has no impact whatsoever on ad sales," Mr. Moss said definitively. Then what, he was asked, was an Alexander Calder-designed 'Ellie' good for? "It makes a lot of people happy." Last year, Mr. Moss won five awards, which prompted Mark Whitaker, then of Newsweek, to quip that he was "the new David Remnick." So, who would be the new David Remnick this year, Mr. Moss?

"I think David Remnick will be the new David Remnick."

Is there a rivalry between your magazines, he was asked. "I don't think it's a real competition. We have many letters that are the same in our titles, but they have more letters than we do. We have more photos. We're a very different magazine. They're really a national magazine that has very little to do with New York. We are a magazine of New York."

Across the room, Wired's editor in chief, Chris Anderson, was speaking of his magazine's three nominations. "It's a great boost for the editorial staff. It values excellence above all else. That's why we come to work."

That's the thing about these awards. Pumped up into an evening awards show with monkeysuits and ball gowns from its origins as a lunch meeting of a professional affinity association, the whole evening itself is actually a little bit—embarrassing, as though nobody else would bother to notice the work that magazine writers and editors do except for themselves. Isn't there someone else out there who wants to give us awards? And yet, who but other magazine editors and writers are capable of evaluating a magazine's work—right?

And so the nominees, their colleagues, their publicists, and their chroniclers who make their living, such as it is, covering the magazine world in blogs and in print (hi!) squeezed themselves into their black-tie best tonight, then managed to squeeze themselves into the crowded, somewhat balmy Rose Hall where they could squeeze one another's hands offering congratulations between squeezing in a few drinks and hors d'oeuvres before the end of the night.

"This is a big moment," said GQ editor in chief Jim Nelson. "This is the thing that we sort of lose sleep over and get psyched about." Mr. Nelson, whose magazine was up for five awards, for General Excellence (500,000-1,000,000 circulation), Feature Writing, Review and Criticism, Design, and Photography, didn't look like he'd been losing any sleep. "I am worried about it," he insisted. "What I try to do is almost block it out."

Framed in one of the lobby's dramatic picture windows facing Central Park, Dale Hrabi, editor at large of Radar, which was nominated for General Excellence in the 100,000-250,000 circulation range, joked about his scrappy magazine's place among its peers: "We feel a little bit like Carrie," he said, referring to Stephen King's telekinetic anti-heroine. "Like maybe someone will dump blood on us."

Maybe the Carrie metaphor didn't work. "She dies at the end, doesn't she?" Mr. Hrabi asked. When told that, in fact, Carrie reaches from the grave to get revenge on her tormentors, he laughed: "Well, there ya go."

Buzz Bissinger, who was nominated for his Vanity Fair feature about the thoroughbred Barbaro, was hoping to win. "It would actually mean a lot," he told Media Mob. "It would sort of certify me as a magazine writer. ... I'd really just like to put that plaque up on the wall. It would be great for the magazine. I'd just like to win. If I don't, I'll be civil and nice."

Civil and nice may be the last words anyone would use in connection with Mr. Bissinger this week after video of him berating Deadspin.com editor Will Leitch on Costas Now hit the Internet. But Mr. Bissinger had a few thoughts now that his tirade had been splashed across many Web sites, including this one. "I don't take back a word of what I said, but I do regret the personal attack on him. It was over the top. We've had a private communication that we've agreed to keep private. Not only was it wrong and disrespectful of him, it made me look silly and really subsumed the very valid points. Too much got lost in my anger."

So, would Mr. Bissinger be launching a blog of his own anytime soon? "Oh, god, no! I don't have anything to say. That's the problem with most blogs. A few of us do; most of us don't."

Speaking of blogs, there was a strong online presence at the event. The Huffington Post's media editor, Rachel Sklar, was snapping pictures (until she was told not to) while FishbowlNY's team pioneered the next-next form of journalism by 'Twittering' updates from their phones. (Sample tweet: "will anna show? Official word is maybe.") Also in attendance, a certain ubiquitous blogger and weekly dating columnist whose floor-length white dress seemed more suited to a Toga Party, posing for photos with editors like Wired's Anderson and Men's Health's Dave Zinczenko. Standing out among the black ties was Jossip.com's David Hauslaib, who flouted the dress code by wearing a pink plaid button down without jacket and tie. Was Mr. Hauslaib happy to be here? "It's another event," he told Media Mob. According to Mr. Hauslaib, he had 700 other things to attend that night as well.

Seven hundred other events? What were they? "Uh, they're private things. Private events."

Mixing in among the editorial types was Bravo's Padma Lakshmi, who offered New Yorker editor David Remnick a kiss and told him she was presenting the category for best fiction. "Her ex-husband writes for our magazine," Mr. Remnick offered helpfully.

Lonny Ross, Katrina Bowden and Judah Friedlander of NBC's 30 Rock were also mingling. They were there to present the Ellie in Leisure Interests, which explained Mr. Friedlander's trademark trucker cap's slogan for the night: "Leisure Expert." The hat was custom made for the event, according to Mr. Friedlander, who likes to custom make hats for every event. "If you're gonna wear a tux, it's gotta be a black hat with white lettering."

Was Mr. Friedlander a fan of any of the nominated magazines? "I don't really subscribe to any magazines. Sometimes I look at them at the store."

Were there a
ny in particular he liked to peruse? "I couldn't even tell you, dude. Almost everything's online now."

As the lights flickered and the attendees began filing into the auditorium, Media Mob cornered Rolling Stone political columnist Matt Taibbi, who was nominated for Columns and Commentary. Was he nervous sharing the nomination with magazine heavyweights like Kurt Andersen, Hendrick Hertzberg and Christopher Hitchens? "It's just a real big surprise to be nominated at all. I didn't really know a helluva lot about it before," he said. "I didn't even know it existed." What's the nomination mean for him? "I get to keep my job for another year."

Cut to the ceremony, which was grooved along by dulcet sounds of a jazz quintet and featured presenters like CNN's Anderson Cooper, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, and Amber Lee Ettinger, better known as "Obama Girl," who reminded the crowd that her video was up for a Webby and voting closed at midnight tonight. (Yes, she sang a few bars of her song.) Magazine world vets like George Lois and Lewis Lapham were on hand to present awards, as was a slightly dazed-seeming Lenny Dykstra, who promised he'd be nominated for an award next year for his magazine, Players Club.

There were the requisite surprises: Mr. Moss only mounted the stage once, for a Leisure Interests package about street food, having been shut out from General Excellence (250,000-500,000 circulation) by Backpacker, whose editor, Jonathan Dorn, offered him an apology and said "at least you've been inhabiting my dreams for months." Radar lost in its category as well, to Mother Jones. The Nation also won an award for Public Interest, which prompting one attendee to quip, "It's lefty night!" Clara Jeffery, co-editor in chief of Mother Jones, took to the stage in a red dress that showed off her very pregnant belly and joked that this was the second best thing to happen to her this year. Due July 22, she told the Media Mob she was so happy, she didn't "even feel the back pain."

David Remnick picked up a General Excellence Ellie for the 1,000,000-2,000,000 circulation category and thanked his magazine's owner, Si Newhouse, for his hands-off approach, saying that Mr. Newhouse's "long silence" during an editorial call early on in his nearly 10-year tenure atop the magazine's masthead "was music to my ears." GQ's Jim Nelson's sleepless nights evidently paid off as he won for General Excellence as well, in the 500,000-1,000,000 circulation level.

First time winners included Atlanta, for Feature Writing by Paige Williams, Condé Nast Portfolio for Magazine Section, Runnersworld.com for General Excellence Online, Bicycling.com for Interactive Feature, and New Letters for Essay, by Thomas E. Kennedy. (The latter win occasioned a scream from the audience.)

Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter took two awards, one for Evan Wright's profile of agent-turned-prowar filmmaker Pat Dollard and one for Annie Liebovitz's photo portfolio "Killers Kill, Dead Men Die."

National Geographic won for General Excellence (over 2,000,000 circulation), Reporting (for a piece by Peter Hessler), and Photojournalism (for a story on Malaria.)

Matt Taibbi won for Columns and Commentary. "I'm very surprised," Mr. Taibbi told Media Mob at the post-awards cocktail reception. Asked later where his Ellie would live, his editor, Eric Bates, answered for him: "Jann Wenner's office."

"Right next to my balls," Mr. Taibbi added.

Spotted near the photo op stage, David Remnick was asked how it feels for the staff to win one National Magazine Award. "Can I be honest?" he asked, semi-conspiratorially. "It's lovely to win these things; disappointing to not. But it lasts for a few days and then you do your thing. Honest. I know it's awards show bullshit but it's true."

So, Ellie firmly in hand again, was Mr. Remnick this year's David Remnick?

"I'm always David Remnick," he said.

True, maybe, but the best solution for the rest of us is obviously for this thing to go to trial so we can learn all about CBS's (alleged) nefarious plot to team up with Karl Rove and destroy investigative journalism.

“You hear about these big contracts coming in, and it whets your appetite,” said Leah McLaren, a columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, who landed a book contract with HarperCollins Canada in 2003 for her chick-lit novel, The Continuity Girl. “You start to think, ‘This is my lottery ticket …. It could be optioned for a movie or become a huge best-seller!’”

Indeed, securing a deal with one of the many esteemed editors at publishing houses like Knopf or Doubleday or FSG seems like fulfilling a kind of New York–specific American dream. Visions of six-figure contracts, KGB readings and TV appearances dance through writers’ heads. Even better: no more office, no more boss.

“But then, it could completely disappear and sell five copies,” added Ms. McLaren whose own book was published to little fanfare as a paperback original in the States this spring. “And you’ll never be heard from again. You’ll disappear. And that’s the real risk of writing a book.”

Slideshow

My Book Deal
Ruined My Life

But just think for a minute, by way of comparison, if a book contract is a lottery ticket …. Evelyn Adams, who won $5.4 million in the New Jersey lottery in 1985 and 1986, now lives in a trailer. William (Bud) Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but now survives on food stamps and his Social Security check. Suzanne Mullins, a $4.2 million Virginia lottery winner, is now deeply in debt to a company that lent her money using the winnings as collateral.

Could such doom await lucky-seeming, envy-enspiring book writers?

Look at Jessica Cutler, a.k.a. Washingtonienne, the D.C. sex blogger who was paid a six-figure advance for her novel, based on the experiences she chronicled on her blog. Suffering under the weight of a lawsuit from an ex-boyfriend, who claims to have been humiliated by her writing, she has now filed for bankruptcy. She can’t even pay her Am-Ex bill.

Then there are the truly epic downfalls of authors like James Frey, whose fabricated memoir caused his life (and his seven-figure two-book deal with Riverhead) to shatter into a million little pieces. Now he’s writing two novels without a contract and posting on the blog and message boards on his Web site, bigjimindustries.com—the literary equivalent of living in a trailer park.

And even before the potential post-publication humiliation, there’s deadline pressure; crippling self-doubt; diets of Entenmann’s pastries and black coffee; self-made cubicles structured with piles of books, papers and unpaid bills; night-owl tendencies; failed relationships; unanswered phone calls; weight gain; poverty; and, of course, exhaustion.

So forget the American dream! Getting a book deal seems more like a nightmare.

In 2002, Daniel Smith, a former Atlantic Monthly staff editor, received the news that he’d gotten a book contract for Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination in a sweltering phone booth at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in woodsy New Hampshire. “There was no cell-phone reception at the time, so you had to get into these poorly ventilated—meaning there was no ventilation—phone booths. You sweat like a pig in there, and that’s how I got the news. And it was extremely exciting,” Mr. Smith told The Observer.

Mr. Smith’s book was inspired by the experiences of his father, an attorney who was ashamed that he heard voices in his head. He passed away in 1998. “I basically signed up to think about my father and his most painful secret every day for the next three years. I basically could sign myself up for mourning every day for three years, which is really not a fun way to spend someone’s life,” Mr. Smith said. “Thinking about insanity every day for many years also is very uncomfortable, because it’s like thinking about death—it’s one of our two greatest fears.”

At one point, said Mr. Smith, the writing was so miserable, “I thought about getting into painting houses or digging ditches, doing anything other than writing—making watches or something like that.”

Mr. Smith faced the problem that many authors struggle with: being stuck with their subjects for one, three, even 10 years at a time.

“I want this woman out of my life so much it’s ridiculous,” said Michael Anderson, 55, who has been researching and writing a book about the playwright Lorraine Hansberry for HarperCollins since 1998. “It has been, in essence, 10 years, and sometimes it seems like, ‘My God, why isn’t this thing done yet?’ But at times I think, ‘My God, it’s only been 10 years.’ I never understood why biographies took so much time; now I’m in awe that any of them get finished.”

When he received his contract, Mr. Anderson was working full-time as an editor at The New York Times Book Review, a job he had for 17 years. He figured he would try to take four years to finish the book and publish it by his 50th birthday. “But that was just naïve,” Mr. Anderson said.

He left The New York Times in 2005, sequestering himself in his Washington Heights apartment to devote himself to the book.

For months, each night, he would be startled from his slumber at 3:30 in the morning in the midst of a thought about Hansberry. “She’s a nice woman, but I don’t want to be with her all the time,” Mr Anderson said.

Nathan Englander spent close to a decade on his second novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, released this April. “I was getting upset about all the articles—you know, ‘After a decade of silence … ,’” Mr. Englander, 37, said in an ominous tone during a phone interview.

“Now I look around and wonder—it’s hard to remember who I was all those years,” Mr. Englander added. “I don’t care about anything when I’m in the work; nothing else matters at all …. People I lost touch with, I’m trying to get back to. I’ll write them, ‘Thank you for your letter in 1999. Here’s what’s been going on.’ You work your way through to get familiar with normal life.”

Aside from losing touch with friends, Mr. Englander also struggled with everyday life.

“I look down and see that I’m only wearing one shoe,” Mr. Englander said in a recent interview with the blog Bookslut. “Recognizing it, I think, How can I walk around like this? Why would I walk around with only one shoe? … Why isn’t that shelf organized, or why didn’t I write that person back or … I can’t understand why the person that is me didn’t do these things. And to that question my mother responds, ‘Because you were like a tortured madman working on this book,’ and I remember and say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s why.’”

“Spouses get very jealous of the biographer’s subject, because it really is what you’re thinking about all the time,” Mr. Anderson explained. “I’ve often thought that if I were married, my wife would’ve sued for divorce.”

The freedom of setting one’s own schedule, of course, is another gift of the book contract—for some, it’s the very motivation to pitch a book in the first place. Work for a few hours, go to yoga, work a little more, eat a sandwich …. It’s a fantasy of independence, without daily or weekly deadlines imposed from above, without being picked at by your nosy co-worker. But then…You miss the co-worker: the ruminations on last night’s Sopranos at the coffee machine, the bitching about deadlines over lunch. You even long for their Z100 sing-alongs and screeching renditions of “Since U Been Gone.”

“I found, when I quit The Times, that the biggest problem is loneliness,” Mr. Anderson admitted.

“Basically, I was giving myself panic attacks in the beginning,” said Ms. McLaren, who took a leave of absence from her column-writing job to move to an isolated farmhouse outside Toronto and write her novel in solitude. “As a newspaper writer, people were always walking over to your desk and being like, ‘Where is it? How’s it coming?’ All that was taken away—there’s no deadline.”

And then there’s the self-loathing.

“You’re not letting people read it as you write it. Nobody has ever read what you’re doing. It could be terrible. It could be brilliant. And you start to think, ‘Oh God, this is a complete piece of shit that couldn’t be published—nobody is going to read it.’ But then you have a sandwich and go, ‘I am a genius and I’m going to win the Booker Prize.’”

Rachel Sklar, 34, the media and special-projects editor for the Huffington Post, barricaded herself her in Lower East Side apartment to work on her book, Jew-ish: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and All the Ish in Between, a humorous “guidebook on being a contemporary Jew,” according to Ms. Sklar. “It’s not like you can pack all that into a pamphlet if you’re going to do it right. You can’t just wing a chapter on the Talmud.” (Originally due in mid-February, the book’s deadline has since been pushed twice—once to May and now to mid-September.)

Ms. Sklar took six weeks off from her blogging job to uniform herself in fuzzy sweatpants, tie her hair into a bun, surround herself in books from the library and Amazon.com, guzzle Diet Coke and immerse herself in Jewry.

“The stack of books kept me where I was. I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t shopping …. I berated myself and may have had a few meltdowns. Well, I definitely had a few meltdowns. But you know, a friend of mine came over at 1:30 [after] a movie premiere with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a box of cupcakes, and it was the greatest pick-me-up ever.”

“The interesting thing is that it’s kind of freeing when you have a real good excuse to tell people no,” said Anna Holmes, 33, the current managing editor of Jezebel, a Gawker-sponsored female-centric blog, and editor of Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters from the End of the Affair. “But there was also that fear that the more I said no, at the end of the whole thing I wouldn’t have any friends left.”

Ms. Holmes stayed bundled in her apartment for about a year between 2001 and 2002, leaving her job as a writer at Glamour to cobble together the book.

“If you have an office job, at least it’s walking to and from the subway every day. When you sit in your house, you seriously gain weight,” Ms. Holmes said in a phone interview from her Long Island City apartment. “I’m eating my Greek yogurt and steamed vegetables—I’m trying to be good about what I’m eating. But I’m still like, ‘I’m getting really soft.’ My idea before the book came out was that I was going to diet, because I had gotten flabby, so that I’d look better to promote it. But that didn’t happen. I was quote unquote dieting for I think two weeks, but I just couldn’t do it.”

After all the months of writing, editing and wrangling permissions to reprint letters, Caroll & Graf released the book in August 2002. But the last thing Ms. Holmes wanted to do was celebrate the publication.

“I was really tired. I wasn’t so much physically tired, I was mentally tired. At the exact moment I was supposed to be promoting it, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. I had to get all excited about this thing that I had just given birth to. It was like postpartum depression…

“I had a hard time getting myself back into my quote-unquote normal life, because I actually started enjoying my [own] company so much and the solitude of it all. I didn’t even want to go out,” Ms. Holmes continued. “I still tend to kind of want to be at home and read and, you know, [become] a cat lady, with my cats.”

And what about that holy grail—the advance? Even the smallest advance can be justified to death as the ticket out of your office job or bartending gig. But is the money that publishers pay most writers enough to make the suffering worth it?

That money, of course, isn’t just for rent and ham sandwiches and Oreos. It’s also for the sky-high freelance taxes (about 37 percent of any untaxed income will be commandeered by Uncle Sam), agent’s fees, fax and copy tabs at the library, travel for research trips and any other number of things. Think about it: $100,000 is actually more like $65,000 after taxes—not bad. But then there’s the 15 percent agent’s cut (another $15,000), leaving you about $50,000. For a year, that’s a livable salary. But once other book expenses are taken into account—like permissions, travel, copies and the like—you’re looking at a modest pile rather than a mountain. There’s really not much left to enjoy—especially if your work stretches on for years.

“When I hear a book deal, I think, ‘Oh, that person made a 100 grand.’ When I have a low-five-figure advance, I call it, like, a small gift, I suppose,” said Ms. Holmes.

She also learned that her publisher wouldn’t pay for the rights to print the breakup letters she wanted to include in the collection. “The advance I got was not money that I could live on; it was money that had to be used to pay permissions for the book,” she said.

Although Mr. Smith said he was able to survive on his advance, he admits that those six-figure deals can quickly dwindle away over the three or four years it takes to write a book. “You’re basically making 30 or 40 grand a year, and that’s not that great of a salary …. It’s really not as much as it seems. These numbers can be very deceptive.”

Yet, still, the dreamers dream. Brendan Sullivan, 25, moved to New York after studying creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.

He hasn’t landed a book deal for his novel, but is determined to find a publisher. “Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.’ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I’ve made many of them since I started …. I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I’ve saved for lost loves.”

Mr. Sullivan has held 27 jobs to support his writing career, from selling chapstick on the street to being a night guard in an art gallery (“That was my favorite job ever, because I just sat in a chair and read novels all day,” Mr. Sullivan added.)

He is currently working on his second novel. His first one, well, “There are eight drafts of it—they’re in my basement right now,” he said in a phone interview from his Fort Greene apartment. He trashed the novel after he got into a public fight with his first agent and decided to start anew. “You have to learn how to suppress your gag reflex in order to get anything out. Like in love, you make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them.”

Indeed, despite the heartbreak, the loneliness, the trashed drafts, the rejected proposals, writers will continue to reach for the golden ticket, the fulfillment of their American dream.

“In terms of the most joyous life to have in the world, in terms of pleasure receptors, it might be like being a heroin addict: It’s the most pleasurable thing that you could choose, if you have that constant access,” said Mr. Englander, before hanging up to head to the coffee shop and write. “I’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, it almost killed me,’ but I’m saying that in the most positive way, because it’s all I want to do.”

Susan Morrison--a former Spy editor, and so friendly with former co-worker Graydon Carter, and now an editor at the New Yorker--made a wee gibe about a new piece by Christopher Hitchens, which was just published in Mr. Carter's magazine, Vanity Fair. That piece explains why women aren't funny.

Salad and chicken and a roll were served, as well as a fluffy cheesecake.

The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar was seated at a table with Conde Nast's director of public relations, Maurie Perl. Mr. Carter was talking about how it was difficult to grow up, and become friendly with people, and still manage to make fun of them. It was easier when we were young, he was saying, and when you're older, you find people are people.

Rachel Sklar had her hand up and, in preface to her question, made a seque comment about women being people too.

She wanted Graydon Carter to tell her why Vanity Fair had published the article that Mr. Hitchens had written.

"You just proved my point," Mr. Carter told her, according to people who were present. He meant that she was humorless.

And so Ms. Sklar had inserted herself into the big feminist bear-trap Mr. Hitchens had set. (The game, which dates to at least the mid-70's, is traditionally played like this: You write an article like that, and those who humorlessly complain are then treated as the proof in the pudding of the article. Which doesn't of course make the complainers any less humorless.)

(Oddly enough, the game doesn't work on black people.)

"And I really wanted to hear him talk about why he published that because he's sitting up there as an arbiter of All Things Funny," Ms. Sklar explained later.

Graydon Carter didn't know who she was. They weren't friends. They'd never worked together. "Who are you?" he asked. She told him she'd already written about the Hitchens piece and offered to send him some links. He wanted to know if she was funny for the Huffington Post.

Ms. Sklar called the Hitchens piece "ungood."

Mr. Carter did not in the end answer her question.

Kurt Andersen entered the fray. Someone present noted that people had gotten that look where they're looking at the floor and smiling in an interesting way.

Mr. Andersen asked Ms. Sklar, what was Mr. Carter supposed to do? If a columnist wrote a piece, and if he's supposed to kill it....? Ms. Sklar said she had thought that editors evaluated pieces before they ran.

After the exchange, the next questioner wanted the Spy alums to talk about Separated at Birth, a feature in which pictures of two or more unlikely people who are found to carry some noticeable physical attribute are juxtaposed.

"I always thought we'd bond over being Canadian," Ms. Sklar said later, via Google Chat, of Mr. Carter. "Oh well."

Fans of Sklar's unique writing style (featuring show tunes and coinages like "blog synchronicity") have nothing to fear: besides editing, she'll also be joining Larry David, Rep. John Murtha, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and contributors to Arianna's virtual cocktail party. In an email to Media Mob, Sklar reports, "I will also be blogging, which I'm extremely excited about."

—Matt Haber