The Fastest-Paying Freelance Writing Job Around

Via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, I found and enjoyed Nick Mamatas's article on writing college term papers for hire. Among his other admissions and observations:

Over the years, several of my friends wanted in on the term paper racket, and most of them couldn't handle it. They generally made the same fundamental error--they tried to write term papers. In the paper mill biz, the paper isn't important. The deadline, page count, and number of sources are. . . .

Another friend of mine spent hours trying to put together an eight-page paper on magical realism in Latin American fiction. At midnight she declared that it was impossible to write that many pages on books she had never read. She was still weeping, chain-smoking cigarettes, and shouting at me at 2 a.m. I took 20 minutes and finished the paper, mostly by extending sentences until all the paragraphs ended with an orphaned word on a line of its own.

Here's the Book Slut interview with Mamatas about his novel Under My Roof, and his review of the Library of America's H. P. Lovecraft collection, which starts with those intriguing words: "One of the more annoying things about readers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror..."