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These magazines are brilliant! Great ''true-life'' stories, like ''Six days after our wedding, he was dead,'' and ''My L-cup boobs made life a misery.'' Plus, the puzzles are rad and sometimes you can win stuff. Cheaper than a tatts ticket and way more fun.
Do you think sometimes people make up stuff in order to get paid $200 for their true life story?
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Fuck the honour of getting in the Hun's 50/50 column, for that price, I'm selling out.
I'm trying to come up with a good ''confession.'' They pay $400 for that.
200 bucks? I got stories!!! Where do I find these mags?
You live in Tasmania. That's a good start.
(sorry, still at work, brain too mashed to be constructive, carry on, etc)
''The day they removd my second head.''
''I discovered my lover was actually my brother!''
That one has been done (pardon the pun) to death.
The ''confession'' in this week's That's Life! is ''I fed fish food to my boyfriend.'' I reckon I could definitely do better than that.
Yeah, that's lame. Easy 400 bucks there, Lilo. They should up the price in relation to how preposterous the confessions are.
an old friend of mine used to collect headlines like that
That's a shit story. You want get $200 unless you give it some kind of twist.
want = won't
*paging inactivist*
I have studied up extensively on That's Life. Tip 1 - You always have to start your personal story with dialogue eg:
''Mum! tell Brynana to stop it!'' my youngest son Jaxxon was screaming in pain at his sister's teasing, while I was busy trying to wrap his birthday present in the other room....blah blah blahhh.......cut to some a hospital scene where they discover after 20 tests he has a second heart or whatever....
send it in.
profit.
I get the feeling TransientRandom lives for this shit.
My friend did exactly that and got a couple published - I've seen them. Were very well balanced - shocking...but not too shocking.
Inactivist has been paged!
Shit's real. Part of MY JOB when I WORKED THERE for a WEEK was checking up on this crazy bullshit. And fact-checking the Horoscopes. Get it?
cough obsessed ahem
This is my band, the Holy Soul at the Big Merino in Goulburn, NSW, two hours south of Sydney. We were on our way back from launching our album in Melbourne.
We travel a lot, so we always make sure to have a copy of ''That's life'' on hand to while away the long hours in transit with real life stories, puzzles, and recipes involving mince. Light on the budget, heavy on taste! We try to share it round the four of us but sometimes it causes fights! We love ''That's life'' and it just wouldn't be a Holy Soul tour without it.
The UK version, ''Pick me up'' is FAR superior for trash value. Available at your local Mag nation, Foodverx Newtown, and other outlets of quality literature.
A week? What period? I worked at Pac Pubs for AEONS, both here and in the UK. Crossed paths! All through uni I was a maildrone, before I moved up to mags.
I know more about TL than T5 purely because I know people (and am related to key people) who launched it. Great idea, implemented very well over here - it relies on base greed and the natural human desire to read something that makes them feel better about themselves. It's why everyone loves it. For years, it was the only magazine to consistently grow during each consecutive audit period - pretty remarkable at the time.
Now, maybe. The quality control's different than when it first started. But most of them are true as they're all rung and fact-checked. People aren't that good with lies, so it's difficult to maintain it when a sub calls to ensure it's legit.
The number of stories we'd see through that weren't able to be published were astonishing. Lots of ones that were too racy, but there were also some terribly sad ones from women in their 70s talking about how they'd had so many kids and they'd smothered one and everyone had chalked it up to infant mortality. I saw that one reasonably regularly. People confess because, as cheesy at it sounds, a lot of readers, the magazine as a friend.
I was also a model in one of those TRUE STORY things once, with two uni mates. I was a lecherous shop assistant. It was rad.
The sheer number of entries in is remarkable. The TL barrel, when I last saw it, had a lift motor attached and was made out of steel. I used to have to clean them out, as all the entries have to be kept for seven years, and the amount of heavy lifting involved is incredible. If you assume there's 250 letters to a kilo (give or take), each Aus Post cardboard mail tray is about 4 kilos, so that's 1000 letters per tray. There's anywhere between 20-50 mail trays arrive per working day, (more on Mondays) and each comp is open for two weeks. That's at least 200,000 entries per week, and often much more. It's freakish.
And yes, all the prizes go out. I know, 'cos I spent a couple of years wrapping and mailing the fuckers. What's weird is that only a third to half of all readers enter the comps. That means the rest are reading the mag for the stories.
Also, Darlene's test kitchen food was awesome. We had one of her Christmas puddings one year and it was like it'd been soaked in rocket fuel.
Most key launch editorial for TL were imported from the UK. Prevailing wisdom used to be that you had to have people from the UK to get your mags to work, fucken.
And work they do! I guess they have a greater bank of ''outrageous stories'' to draw from, population-wise.
I picked up a nice eyeshadow from ''Take Five'' a month or so ago. Nine colours!
Dude, it was Take 5 this year, for only a week (as a fill-in during my off-time filling in at ZOO).
I listened to the letters editor talk some old rural grandma through how to set up a hotmail account. That was a slow morning. Everything was hand-written and mailed. Seriously, people still send letters to magazines with photos of their grandchildren developed from film and notated on the back in pen. There's a whole 'nother world out there, past the broadband network. It was terrifying to watch all these humans becoming obsolete.
It's even more terrifying to see skin shots of them.
You wish I were joking.
Ha, ask Mealzebub about T5...
Ha! Yes, unsurprisingly Peopl got handed around at ZOO.
I would do anything to work there!
That would be People, not the Russian celebrity softball magazine Peopl.
Hee hee, the first photo does look like it could come from a People cover.
I was chief sub at T5 for two years. Given I'd worked at THE PICTURE beforehand, it gave me a handy bullshit radar. Many, MANY women I'd interviewed as Home Girls turned up with fake cancer sob stories and I had to have stand-up fights with the T5 ed at the time to prove they were pathological liars. HOWEVER, most of the stories in there are completely true, and very thoroughly fact checked. There are some SERIAL contributors, though, who submit tips and stories under several names. We had a shit list of 'em. Good times! My fave-ever headline was: ''A MANGO TREE KILLED MY DAUGHTER''.
Yup. Surprise surprise, Take 5 is fact-checked far more heavily than ZOO. That's all I learned. And that they were a lovely bunch of lasses who worked like drover's dogs (or some such).
When I was freelancing, the That's Life! chief sub, Wayne, tried to talk her out of running a recipe and photos of ''Blue-Veined Bangers''. It was very true to its description. It ran.
Yup.
Unrelated, but I vaguely remember subbing a collection of Woman's Day celebrity recipes featuring Ella Macpherson's Fish Tacos. Too perfect.
Also, what is very disturbing about those mags is the amount of grandmothers whose handwriting is not Copperplate. It's all ''o'' as a dot over the ''i'' and dreadful phonetic spelling.