HELP A BROTHER OUT! (A REQUEST FOR GUEST POSTS)

Yeah, I know, it seems like I was begging for help only last week, but here I am doing it again. I mean, fuck, it worked out so well last week that I’m feeling lucky and rolling the dice again.

Veteran readers of the site will remember that once upon a time I used to take one long vacation every November. And every time I took a vacation, I would beg for guest posts to keep things going. That hasn’t happened in two years, but it’s finally about to happen again — as in Monday of next week (Nov 25). Yes, I’ll be winging my way to the land of milk and honey and will not be returning to the land of rain and mold until December 8. And while I’m away, I won’t be churning out posts with the same maniacal frenzy to which you’ve become accustomed.

Our other regular writers are dedicated, they are tireless, and most importantly they work for free. But it’s too much to ask them to shoulder the burden on their own narrow shoulders alone. Actually, it’s not too much to ask, but they would most likely tell me to go fuck myself. So I’m asking our dedicated, tireless, and uncompensated readers to help them fill the void.

So here’s the deal: If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of writing something for publication at NCS or some other metal blog, now’s a good time to give it a shot. Or maybe you’ve been generous enough to submit guest posts here in the past and might be willing to do it again. Details about this stunning opportunity to do my work for me, free of charge, are after the jump . . .

What you submit can be long or short — whatever you have time to create. It can be a show review, an album review, a piece designed to bring a relatively unknown band to a broader audience, thoughts about the scene or about recent news blurbs, something in the vein of our “THAT’S METAL!” posts or one of our other regular features — or anything else that’s related to metal that strikes your fancy.

I’ll start posting guest pieces next week and continue running them through December 8, or until I run out of material. You can send them to me any time between now and December 8, but the sooner the better.

Here are a few other things you need to know:

1.  Send your submissions as some kind of document or text-file attachment to an e-mail, addressed to islander@nocleansinging.com.  You can also paste the text into the body of the e-mail.

2.  In your e-mail, tell me what name you want to use as your by-line (i.e., your real name, if you don’t care about trashing your personal reputation, or a nom de plume).

3.  If you want to include a graphic or embedded video or a link to another web page, be sure to include web links in your text so I can embed them in the post.  As you probably know, we like to include music in just about everything we publish here, so this is encouraged.

4.  We do have certain standards here at NCS. Granted, they’re pretty fucking low, but still, I have to reserve some small amount of discretion on the final publication decision. It’s either that, or I have to let the lorises decide what goes up on the site, and I don’t trust those fuckers any farther than I can throw them.

5.  Don’t worry too much about showing your ass, because I’ll fix typo’s and and any ungrammaticalnessness that I see. And if your ass happens to look like this, showing it would be a plus:

And that’s it.

Oh wait, I should also mention that I’m not through begging for reader input. Next week we’ll be making our annual appeal for reader lists of the year’s best albums. HERE is what last year’s version of that post looked like. So if you’re the list-making sort of metalhead, start thinking about that. You know, as soon as you stop thinking about that butt.