About The Site

The Internet is a big place. Anyone who’s looked around online for even an hour knows that. There’s things to look at, news to hear about, people to talk to, and a nearly limitless supply of things to masturbate to. There are videos of cats, videos of comedians, and videos of hideous and terrifying creatures that are at least polite enough to live in far-off lands. There are games, there are comics, and there are all sorts of people to call gay, fat, and retarded. And of course, there are things to read.

The Internet is, impossibly, an even bigger place for people trying to get their work noticed, writers in particular. There’s sixteen-and-a-half million LiveJournal accounts alone. That’s like walking into the Netherlands with a big box of diaries and passing one out to every singler person you meet, the main difference being that you’d probably get more readers that way. And that’s just on LiveJournal, with millions more BlogSpots, Facebook notes, and MySpace whaddayacallits filling up the ‘net with their literary static. It’s obvious that employers aren’t going to comb through all that bullshit to find something worth publishing, so it sadly becomes the responsibility of those wishing to be published to… get published.

Enter a site like Cracked, which has a few unique traits in the Internet writing scheme. First, it accepts submissions without a previous writing resumé. Second, it actually pays for articles written. Third and most important, it has a readership in the hundreds of thousands. For a few glorious days, a writer with no experience can bask in the knowledge that half a million people are reading something that they wrote. It is an excellent feeling.

The problem: those half-million people aren’t reading your writing for you. They’re reading it because it’s on one of their favorite sites, and they’re going to forget your name as soon as they click away. So what do you do with the few thousand people that liked what you wrote enough to actually ask after who did the writing? What if some of those thousands are publishers, desperate to give their money to some talented individual? Where do they go?

For me and a few others, the answer is: here. Here, people can see what kind of shenanigans us small-time writers get up to when we aren’t gussying up our words for the high-traffic sites. Here, that disconsolate publisher can brush the tears from his eyes as he sees what we can do and subsequently reaches for his chequebook. Here, we have a place that’s ours, a place that makes the Internet just a little smaller.

- Malcolm Christiansen

How To Contact Us

It’s easy! Just send an e-mail to “mchristiansen (at) thelastgaffe (dot) com” with “FOR AUTHOR’SNAMEHERE” in the subject line, and it’ll be forwarded pronto to whoever you want to get in touch with! We do ask that you keep your fawning adoration to 3000 words or less, and that any nude photos you send are tastefully done.