As long as I've known it the majority(not all but a majority) of cracked articles use click bait and have before buzzfeed. In reality cracked started click bait, but with content that is actually entertaining

If she has already agreed to do it then I think it's best I just stay out of the way. Unless there's more than one of them, in which case that seems like a systemic problem.

In the early days of my blog (we're talking late 90s here) my most common running bit was an article that started out normal and then slowly went off the rails, like seeing how long the reader would stick with it before realizing the author was insane. So one Halloween I just had a simple idea to write a campfire story that started out like this very straightforward haunted house thing, then it would slowly get stupider and stupider, until they were being chased around this house by a pile of haunted meat products. It went over so well that the next year I wanted to do it again, but basically set it in the same universe and as a continuation of that story. Around then I started sketching out the larger themes and universe and this continued for about five years, until I had something that was about novel length. But that's why JDATE reads are more episodic than my other books, it was originally a serial and each bit came to what felt like an ending. I think it was in the third year I started calling it "John Dies at the End" as a running joke, like every year they'd come back to find out if John was going to die in that one.

Yeah and I don't think there's any mystery to it, put somebody behind a mask or a wall of anonymity and it is safer to be honest, you don't have to deal with the repercussions. As for the Cracked comments, my best case scenario would be a bunch of moderators who could keep things under control as far as the death threats and gamergate invasions etc. It has always been a staffing issue - that's a thankless task and you can't leave it up to volunteers (we've tried). If that's not possible then the debate is always do you have the comments knowing that while they're mostly good, there is going to be a certain percentage of horrific threats toward writers? Morally it seems hard to justify that, I personally would prefer to make people take their discussion elsewhere than know that I provided a platform for someone to harass the writers or make them feel unsafe. It doesn't take too many sadistic stalkers to spoil the whole thing for everyone. TL;DR: It's better to have no comments than unmoderated comments, but moderated comments are best.

Probably Douglas Adams, just because that was the first time I saw a writer really dedicate himself to working a punchline into every sentence of narration - a character walks through a door, and there's something funny about the door. But I've read more Stephen King than anyone, the little things he does to ground the world (such as, mentioning real brands and TV shows) makes the horror so much scarier. You can see I do that a lot.

Snake, the movie is only six minutes long and the last five are just of the snake digesting him. It's based on a true story.

It's a ton of fun but discouraging because you find out there are soooo many people doing it, and doing it well. And I've always been more information junkie than comedian, I don't know that I'd have ever broken out if I hadn't branched out into that other format (the first huge one was the article on video game annoyances).

Geography. Both of my book, uh, franchises take place in fictional towns, and in fictional buildings. The action depends on characters being in a certain place at a certain time and their reason for being there has to make sense. So I have to keep track of how far away this imaginary building is from that one, and how far away both are from the highway, because there can't be any moments where the reader stops and says, "Wait, how did he get there so fast? I thought the reason they were in danger was because he was like two hours away." So there's this very tedious process of mapping out where everything and everybody is, there's nothing fun or creative about it, but it has to be done, and I have gotten stopped for long stretches because of having backed myself into a corner geographically. Not to compare myself with him, but I think George RR Martin also struggles with this, like you can see instances where it took one character several months to traverse the map, then in another a different character just arrives at their destination as if they flew there. People ask why he takes so long to write a book but I'm amazed he's able to do them at all, the complexity astounds me.

Well it's the same challenge for any entertainment outlet, I'm not saying anything crazy here. I'm sure the writers of The Simpsons would like to say, fuck it, let's make this whole thing fresh again and have Homer just leave his family and become a hired assassin in Miami. But obviously that threatens to wreck the whole thing - many a TV show "jumped the shark" not because they got stale, but because they tried some crazy change in the format. So as far as I know, the best thing to do is to balance giving people what they want while experimenting here and there to try to keep things fresh. I mean, we just ran an account of a parent who had to deal with a baby born with a horrifying birth defect, and what it was like to navigate that situation. Do you think we would have run that article in 2007? John just did a column in which he wrote a detailed first-person narrative version of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme. We don't say no to writers who want to do something new and crazy, it's just that all of them know that even now, you get a lot more traffic with a list of mind blowing things.

If they told me that Jon Hamm was playing Will Blackwater I wouldn't be too upset. Zoey would need to be a young unknown, but you know they'd try to Jennifer Lawrence that shit. Main villain would be Michael Cera.

If changes to a movie ruin the book for you then it's perfectly reasonable to stay away. It isn't like that for me - I watch The Two Towers and when the elves show up at Helm's Deep I just shrug and say, "Oh, that's cool, yeah it kind of makes sense they'd have a better chance if the elves were there." Like I don't see any book as a sacred text, no matter who wrote it. A movie is an adaptation, not a transcription - they're not just taking it page by page and filming it for the screen, they're taking the raw material and molding it into something new. And it has to be new, by necessity - a film is a different medium from the ground up, the whole story structure is different, the language by which it conveys its ideas is different. I think once you accept that you can kind of relax and say, "Okay, let's see what this creative person can do with the material."

But it is going to deviate, it has to. If that bothers you because it messes up the canon as it exists in your head, that's understandable. You have the right to enjoy things however you see fit.

It's a bit rough around the edges. This is coming from a big JDATE fan.

Well if you're just publishing it yourself - like posting it online the way I did, or doing a print-on-demand thing, the biggest problem is publicity. Even if your book is great, nobody will read it if they don't know about it, and the average person doesn't have much power to advertise. You have to be very clever about how you do it, and absolutely relentless.

If you're doing it the old fashioned way and sending your manuscript to an agent, then the problem is they don't know you and have no reason to read your thing, it's just going into a pile. But again you just have to be persistent - people successfully do it all the time. Either way, there's going to be a wall you'll have to break through.

No question, it's that one I wrote with Jack about guns: http://www.cracked.com/article_20396_5-mind-blowing-facts-nobody-told-you-about-guns.html There was just so much research to do, and so much of that research is biased or politicized, and we were so obsessed with trying to be balanced in our approach ... it went through a lot of drafts, a lot of scrapped entries, a lot of homework. I thought it turned out well though, got a lot of positive emails about it.

I'm just impressed that you're able to tell they're squirrels

Our two most famous ones had babies and for some reason decided that was more important, we still have Kathy Benjamin and Kristi Harrison and some promising new ones like Eden Dranger and Emma Larkins, but yeah we need way more. It doesn't matter how open-minded your writers are, they'll never have the same perspective. But the most important thing is we need writers who are willing to abandon their families.

What does gender have to do with anything? It seems pretty sexist that you would even notice such a thing.

Edit: haha getting down voted for pointing out obvious sexism on Reddit. I never thought I'd see the day...

lol isn't it obvious man?

Why an Asian sounding surname specifically?

Why not?

I would also love to get my hardcovers signed.

Y'know, John Dies at the End is one of my favourite reads I've experienced and I enjoyed the movie adaptation and this is the first time I've ever seen its acronym. JDATE sounds like one of those themed dating websites.

We talked about a tour early in the process when we were discussing promotion of this book, and I kind of shot it down just purely because of the time commitment. Remember I have three jobs going right now: 1) working full time at Cracked 2) promoting this new book 3) writing JDATE 3. So taking two weeks of precious vacation time from Cracked to hit the road and sign books would be a lot of fun but it would make life a lot harder for me in the future, due to the amount of piled-up work that would greet me when I got back.

The signed books thing is kind of the same deal - the last time I offered to sign books by mail (and just kind of mentioned it briefly on FB and in the forum) I got more than 250 orders. I don't have a staff, so it's just me signing and buying packing materials and driving back and forth to the post office (and for international orders, filling out that customs form for everyone) and that wound up taking A LOT of time. Remember that a certain number of them are going to get lost, or be wrong, or come back due to a bad address, and once again it's all on me to work through and fix it. Like even if I charged some crazy amount for each one it wouldn't matter - it's not about the money, it's about time.

Just see some of his replies.

I'd have to say (SPOILER!) the penis-shaped crowd from Spiders, only because you spend literally the whole book leading up to that moment. As for the suit, the problem I have is never the suit itself, it's me, and the fact that suits make me so uncomfortable that I don't know how to stand or where to put my arms etc, and you can immediately tell. So I think the suit that would come off best would be one that somehow makes me comfortable wearing it.

The responses are either deeply personal accounts of people saying it saved their life, or extremely angry responses from people saying suicide is their choice and who am I to tell them otherwise. But even in the second instance, I think anger is better than despair, and the sheer fact that they read all the way through the article shows they have doubts. I like to think they're all still out there today but that probably isn't true.

Any of Seanbaby's Popsicle Pete comics.

I don't have a lot of spare time, so I'd hire other people to kill at random for me, I'd call myself the Outsourcer. Or some other name my staff came up with, I'd outsource that part too.

Oh, man, you have NO IDEA how much of those podcast episodes are Jack, and how little of it is me. It's great that you like the parts where I'm talking but we have to balance each other out. It'd be like a Mythbusters where it's just Jamie. You don't realize how depressing he is to listen to until he doesn't have Adam there to liven things up. They each bring something out of each other, and so do we.

Concerning your edit, there is an older article full of book recommendations that I wanna say Brockway wrote. It's where I found my all time favorite book, Lamb by Christopher Moore. I'll try to dig it up for you later.

It's shameful how little time I have to read these days, I liked 14 by Peter Clines a lot (Lovecraftian horror, but in a very grounded way) and you're going to think I'm just shilling here but The Unnoticeables by Robert Brockway is great, it's horror set in a 1970s punk universe, I've never read anything like it.

As for how I do what I do... I work 80-100 hours a week, depending on the week. I get up at 9 and work until 1-2 AM, I will take a few hours off on the weekends to watch a movie or something with my wife, that's it. I don't go out, I don't have hobbies (I haven't bought a video game since March), I work while the TV is on. I have a laptop on my exercise bike, so I can keep answering email while I work out. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, there's no work/life balance here. But entertainment careers tend to be short and I want to create as much as I can while people are listening. And when it all goes away, I want to know that I did good work while I could.

Depends on what I have planned that day

It's like 5% different in tone from JDATE, it's not a straight horror novel but if there was no name on the cover it'd take you about ten seconds to realize who wrote it. I'm still me.

It is frustrating to look back and realize how many issues I was told weren't issues at all. Like in church I was told that nobody REALLY believes in evolution, that it's just this crackpot thing that somebody came up with to mock the Bible. It annoys me that they weren't honest about that - it's fine to hold a certain belief, and to even hold a belief that runs counter to evidence (for instance, I believe that my pets really love me, rather than that they're just waiting for me to feed them). But it bugs me that they didn't present the whole picture and say, "We know this is how the world sees it, but here's why it's important to believe our version."

So I've just tried to ... not do that. To say here's my point of view, but more importantly, here's how I arrived there. I link to my evidence, I walk through my argument. So where lots of people disagree with me and rightfully point out that I'm no expert, what I hope everyone appreciates is that there is an honesty to what I'm doing - I'm showing you how the logic works in my mind, and if you still aren't convinced, that's fine. I'm not right about everything. But I never want to just throw it out there as, "Here's the truth and you're an idiot for thinking otherwise."

I really don't do that, I mean the moment you finish a book you're immediately greeted with a long series of tasks that have to be done to make sure it isn't a disaster (editing, promotion, etc) so it's always just onto the next thing. But I should say that I enjoy the work itself, I like the process. So offering to send me to Hawaii for two weeks wouldn't be a reward, I'd spend the whole time wishing I was back at work.

Obviously not David Wong but why is this a problem? No one at Cracked is stopping someone from sending in articles or applying for positions. Are they supposed to just look around the street for a black dude and offer him a job?

I'm sorry but this is a problem here I'm South Africa with black economic empowerment. Black people are made CEOs of companies not necessarily because they're the best people for the job, but because it's required, and those companies will get more business if they're seen as BEE compliant.

Audio books are a whole different deal, they're not reading, they're performing. They're doing inflection, different voices, etc. It's hard to overstate how talented those people are and how difficult their job is. I'd suck at it.

I think everyone should have their own site but it's really really hard to make money doing it. So it depends on what your goals are.

I get paid a good salary to write poop jokes from home, so I can't complain. I work with people who are both very talented and also very tolerant of my awful personality, it's a great team and when I'm old I'll look back on this as the best time of my life. Mainly because the world will be overrun with zombies by then.

Well you don't want them to walk into a similar situation to what they already have, so I'm going to say Downton Abbey

Probably? There's never a huge audience following them or anything but it seems to be a lot of fun for the core group of people who do get involved. We'll see, if we don't do that we'll try to think up something else that's creative and amusing, so we're not just yelling at you to pre-order the book every day for six straight months.

God I don't know, I get this question constantly but I'm the worst author to ask because I took such a weird path to publication. But these days, there's no one right way. The Martian was published just like my first book, I think - the guy just pasted it onto his website one chapter at a time. Wool by Hugh Howey was a self published Kindle book and now that's going to be a Ridley Scott movie. Other writers are doing it the normal way, getting an agent and all that.

I have no useful advice because I had that weird thing where my small book (online and in limited Print on Demand paperback) got noticed by a movie producer who bought the rights, which triggered a domino effect of the publisher approaching me to do it in hardcover - it all sort of happened without me, I didn't have an agent or anything, I had to hire one after the fact, to look at the contracts they were already trying to get me to sign. That was pretty rare, I got very lucky.

I rewrite constantly, everything you see has been rewritten a dozen or two dozen times. I use a lot of placeholder dialogue and text, knowing I'll go back and change it later. That's not necessarily the best way to do it, I know a lot of writers don't do it that way. It's just how I work, I have a really short attention span so I hop from one task to the next, putting down placeholder text for stuff I don't feel like messing with right now.

Spiders is a good college read. There's college students in it.

You have to make sacrifices, that's all I can say. I absolutely know how a person can work full time and write a novel because I did it. I absolutely do NOT know how a person can work full time, write a novel, and have an active circle of friends they see every week, a need for a hobby they tend to regularly (like video games) and/or raise a kid. I didn't do those things, I worked and wrote and slept. I neglected everything else. As for my process, there's nothing special about it - I've got a window open with a word doc and I've got some website or other open in another window and I probably have the TV on, too. Distractions don't bother me. I do outline a fair amount in advance but lots of authors don't, it's all about what works for you. Some writers write in the morning, that's not me.

Iron Man, because I like the idea of stepping out of the suit and no longer being a superhero. Just a billionaire.

When you do this for a living, you find yourself trying to think up article ideas all the time, like you'll read some news article about some guy who sued his neighbor based on suspicions she was casting magic spells on him, and won the case. So then you think, is this a trend, are there other cases where people have successfully sued based on some kind of accusation of witchcraft? Is that a thing? So then you go read about it and if it's a thing, you turn it into an article. But it all starts just with being curious about the world and wanting to follow up on subjects like that.

It's something that comes with practice, if you spend all of your time to think up weird ways to phrase things, eventually you get good at it. But some of that is just my personality, I'd be phrasing things like that even if I wasn't contractually obligated to.

I had no idea Periscope existed until somebody sent me the link, after having read the preview of Suits. But I can't claim to be a prophet or anything, it was pretty easy to see coming. It makes sense that personal livestreaming will be the future, and it makes sense that somebody will eventually come up with an interface that helps people browse all those streams. The end goal is clearly to get to a place where people can jump into big events as they occur, in real time. Being there without being there.

Not one thing, but all of the stuff about animals just blows my mind (thus the titles). Like that parasite that takes over a cockroach's brain and reprograms it to commit suicide, shit like that. Nature is terrifying, and I had no interest in that stuff before I worked here.

That's how you get ghost fleas

I'd love to know but I'm afraid to ask. I'm sure there are business reasons or something.

John started doing work as an editor for the site, but he's been putting articles out recently.

I don't want anyone to misconstrue what I'm about to say - the magic of Cracked is that many of your favorite articles were written by people who had literally never written anything before - we're willing to coach people through that process and watching them grow into writers is what makes this job worthwhile. But in terms of "Standing out" meaning "hey look at that guy" (as opposed to "Hey this pitch looks like it can work") usually it's the ones who have a distinct voice, like when Robert Brockway showed up in 2007 there was no doubt, it was clear he had his own rhythm and voice etc and had been doing it a while. As for me, it was probably after running my own site for a few years, maybe around 2003-04, though there are people who insist they like my early stuff better, so maybe I'm steadily getting worse?

Well my book career actually pre-dates Cracked, I was editing the JDATE hardcover when they hired me in 2007 and I got the deal for Spiders shortly after, so there's never been a time when I didn't have a book deadline on the side. But managing my time is the hardest part, all of my vacation time is used to write on the books. The danger isn't taking time away from Cracked to write books, it's that I'm always on the verge of burnout. There's just no downtime.

EDIT: As for a Spiders movie, if there's ever news about that stuff it can't come from me, the studio or whoever would want to release it on their own timeline.

I can't say anything about any upcoming movie or TV stuff, as for the JDATE movie, I knew going in that a movie that held perfectly to my vision of the novel would be a terrible movie - the plot structure would be all wrong for film. So I never had any illusions that they could shoot a scene-by-scene recreation that would be like four movies long, I knew he would have to take what worked about the book and compress it down to about 25% of its size. So understanding that, I thought what he created was miraculous. By the way, I think at this point like ten times as many people have seen the movie as have read the book, I think it still hangs around people's Netflix recommendations if they like horror at all.

I thought Don did a great job writing the screenplay, we talked early about the broad strokes of what elements of the story could be left in or cut, but ultimately he wrote it and then had to make those choices again when editing the movie. I could never have done it - not just because I've never written a screenplay before, but because I'd be too close to it, there's a difference between the lines that are my favorites and the ones that actually do the best job of advancing plot and character (which is paramount in a movie). But he was such a fan of the book that I can guarantee that the cuts were just as painful for him. If it had been possible to do JDATE as a six-part miniseries Game of Thrones style, I'm sure we would have. The audience probably wouldn't have tolerated it though.

Well I'm on here every day, check my post history. But the pockets of racists and such fucking terrify me. You'll see the old "Fat people hate" guys brigade some thread and upvote the nastiest shit to the top, and you'll think, "Oh my god, Redditors are monsters." But then you'll go into some science thread where all the comments are thoughtful and sharp and realize that all you're seeing are these gangs that kind of hop from thread to thread, upvoting each others' hatred to try to make it look like their point of view is the majority. I try really hard not to paint all of Reddit with the same brush, but seeing a glimpse of that ugly side makes it hard. Especially the kind of overt racism/xenophobia you see in r/worldnews, etc.

Yes but I don't want to spoil anything. There's always this meta element where you know you're reading a book with the fictional narrator's name on the cover. You always know "he" is messing with you.

Written myself, the Robin Williams "tribute": http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/robin-williams-why-funny-people-kill-themselves/ As far as ones I've edited... god, I wouldn't even know where to start. I edit six articles a week, they're all amusing or interesting to me, my favorites are the ones where they're making a point that would never have occurred to me in a million years. Like this one (though I think I barely touched it, editing wise): http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-baffling-things-about-womens-clothes/

Well it was the same for me, I was raised in a town with just a few thousand people and went to a Pentecostal church every Sunday, my world changed when I met some new friends in high school (it doesn't matter where you live, your people are out there) and then even more when I went away to college. But I also didn't have the internet, because it hadn't been invented yet. It feels like it'd be easier now more than ever to find like-minded people to hang with, even if you're not physically in the same room.

Well the timeline in Spiders does jump around some, and it's played for humor and/or to knock the reader off kilter, like you saw something happen then you rewind and realize it wasn't what you thought. I think that will always be part of the JDATE series, because part of those stories are about Dave not being at all clear what's going on, and the reader needs to always be just disoriented enough to feel what Dave is feeling. This is one of those cases where confusion on the part of the reader is a feature, not a bug - that's part of what makes it scary, that there's no neat answer to the question, "What's going on?"