On Twilight Fan Fiction, Content Mills, and the Strangling of Creativity

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a content mill. It’s about creating a high churn of work at a very low price. It’s about blasting out as many messages as possible – it’s pure, useless drivel. Best of all, it makes us feel like we’re actually achieving and accomplishing things – look! This is out! Now this! Now this! – when in fact we’re just spinning our wheels.

The more churn work I’ve done (at the request of paying parties), the more it got me to thinking about why we continue to...