(2021-07-23) I Was David Wong

Jason Pargin: I was David Wong. "David Wong" was a character I'd created in the mid-90s for a series of unpublished stories and screenplays.

When I started a blog in 1998, I posted in first-person as that character, mainly to keep my day job from figuring out it was me. Once my writing reached a wider audience in the early 2000s, I began making my real name public.

I was raised in one of the poorest counties in rural Illinois.

I attended a rural community college for two years thanks to another part-time job, a scholarship and federal Pell grants. I spent the two years after that at a university in Southern Illinois, paying with student loans and $15,000 in credit card debt. I studied broadcast journalism and landed my first job in the industry before I'd even graduated

I left TV news after two years because I found it unfulfilling and also I objectively sucked at it

That position paid exactly five dollars an hour (they knew people like me needed it for resume-building and offered the literal minimum), so I took another job on the side and, in addition, started blogging in hopes of turning that into a third stream of income. (multiple streams of income)

I then worked two entry-level office jobs (doing billing at a law office and data entry at an insurance company) for 70 hours a week, managing my website on evenings and weekends. I slept about five hours a night and saw my friends like twice a year. That would be my life for most of a decade.

I started writing John Dies at the End in 2000.

The site continued to grow in traffic but I was making no substantial money from it

After five years or so, JDatE had grown into a novel-length story. I sold self-published copies and then later signed a deal with a publisher of print-on-demand.

By that point, around 2006, I had been attempting to write on the side for eight years and there was no sign I was ever going to make a living from it.

I decided to give up writing and focus my energy on training for a new career. I took out high-interest loans for courses in C++ coding, Access databases and Windows NT/networking, only to realize I had no competency

In 2007, within a three-week span, I sold the film rights to John Dies at the End and, in a totally unrelated turn of events, was offered a full-time job at comedy startup Cracked.com (a website that was to be reborn from the old humor magazine that had just folded). Just like that, I'd basically won the lottery.

The movie went into production with Paul Giamatti attached. The novel would be rereleased in hardcover by St. Martin's Press

Cracked.com would, in my time as part of the editorial leadership, grow from a two-employee operation into a multimedia brand with thousands of contributors worth $38 million.

no, I didn't get any of that money - I didn't own the site, I just worked there

I left that job in early 2020 because the stress had ruined my health, but also because I was financially able to

In 2017, the digital publishing industry collapsed and, in December of that year, Cracked's parent company closed the office and laid off 80% of the staff... two giant companies, Google and Facebook, came to dominate online advertising and also controlled the flow of traffic in ways you’re probably not even aware of. After the 2016 election, each company radically altered their model to direct traffic to political commentary, outrage pieces and breaking news, choking off revenue to sites like Cracked (as well as College Humor, Funny or Die, The Onion, Clickhole, Upworthy and a bunch of others, all of whom wound up laying off staff in the aftermath).