Time for Part 13 in this series of cautions and recommendations to folks who want to sell their writing or sell more of it. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here, Part 9 can be read here, Part 10 can be read here, Part 11 can be read here and Part 12 can be read here. Part 13 can be read starting after the little line below…

---

Writers — especially new ones — are always being asked to write on "spec," which is short for "speculation." It means if the editor or producer or other "boss" likes it and accepts it, you get paid for it and if they don't, you don't.

Should you work this way? Occasionally. There's a gamble involved and in this world, there are good gambles and bad gambles. In my 47-year career as a professional writer, I would guess that about 10% of the time I've been asked to write on "spec," they were good gambles. This is not to say I didn't foolishly take some of the bad ones.

What do I mean by "good gambles?" Well, let's say you have a chance to buy a ticket in a lottery. You invest five bucks in a ticket, they sell 500 tickets and if your number is picked, you win a million dollars. That's a great gamble. I'd take that gamble any day. I'd buy as many tickets as I could in that gamble.

OK, but what if instead of selling 500 tickets, they sold 500 million tickets? Not such a good gamble.  Maybe you could invest that money in something that stands a better chance of yielding a return on it.

In the lottery analogy, the odds are easier to assess. When writing jobs are offered, it ain't so simple. How much, in terms of time, are you investing? What are the rewards — monetary or otherwise — if they do accept your work? How many other submissions will yours be competing against? You may not know the answers to those questions so you may not be able to gauge how good or bad a gamble it is.

A big mistake some writers make is to do too much spec work. A very large percentage of it leads to nothing and often not because someone didn't like what you wrote.

Often, your submission does not get read or properly considered. Also too, there are times when you send in your spec entry and it turns out that the "buyer" really isn't in a position to buy. They misrepresented to you how firm the project is or how firm their financing is…and you realize that this one was a much worse gamble than you were led to believe.

Also, as we'll discuss, it can put you in an unfavorable negotiating position…plus with some potential employers or buyers, the mere fact that you were willing to write with no guarantee of payment makes you and your work seem less impressive.

You can even — and this does not happen as often as many writers think but it does happen — leave yourself open to having your ideas stolen without anyone actually hiring or paying you. (In the near future, I shall be devoting at least one of these columns to discussing that.)

Still, you do need samples of your writing. Once in a while, someone will hire you as a writer because they meet you and you make a good impression. Or they're impressed by your past credits or a recommendation from someone they trust.

Usually though, they want to read something you've written, preferably something not wildly dissimilar from the kind of writing they need. If you have a published article or book or a script you sold that fills that need, great. That might do fine. If you don't, you might have to write something up since it's unlikely anyone is going to pay you to write what you need to have.

Back in the seventies as I've mentioned here, I broke into TV writing partnered with a very smart guy named Dennis Palumbo. We got a fair amount of work based on a spec M*A*S*H script we wrote even though the producers of M*A*S*H (who read it and said they liked it) never quite had need of our services. When Dennis and I went our separate ways, I had this problem: Our agent had no sample of solo M.E. writing he could send someone.

I am told this has changed a bit in Hollywood but at the time — mid-seventies — if you wanted to land a job writing for an existing series, you had to show them a script, purchased or otherwise, for an existing series. They didn't want to see something original. They wanted to see if you could work with existing characters and an existing format and write something true to both. That's why Dennis and I had written that spec M*A*S*H.

Why M*A*S*H? Because you should always aim high. That was then considered one of the two best-written sitcoms on the air, the other being The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The agents we secured, in part because of our spec M*A*S*H, told us that 90% of the spec scripts being done to try and land comedy writing assignments just then were M*A*S*H or Mary.

After the split, I lunched with Bernie the Agent and asked if I should write one of those, sans Dennis. Bernie instead suggested I whip up a spec for the then-popular series, Maude, and he suggested I do it in a helluva hurry.

Why Maude? Because Bernie represented the producers and all or most of the story editors on Maude. He could definitely get a Maude script by me read by the top guys there. They had tons of spec scripts submitted to them and very few of them got read by anyone with the power to say, "Hey, we're hiring this guy!" Mine would be.

Why in a hurry? Because Maude was just about to "staff" for the new season. They would soon be hiring additional story editors and committing to freelance writers. Also, Bernie could furnish me with copies of a number of Maude scripts from the previous season — which he did.

So of course I agreed to do it. Has any writer seeking a job on a TV series ever had more going for him? Besides, I needed a writing sample anyway and with Bernie (and the Writers Guild's established minimums) protecting me, I wouldn't do the work, then find out later that it paid poorly.

I read the scripts Bernie sent me. I studied that week's episode of the show. I came up with an idea. I wrote a script. I delivered a copy of it to Bernie. Total elapsed time from when he told me to do this to the moment he had that script: A bit less than a week. That's pretty fast.

Bernie read it right away and called me. "This is perfect," he said. "You really captured all the characters perfectly, especially that Mrs. Naugatuck." Mrs. Naugatuck was the crusty British housekeeper on the series played by Hermione Baddeley.

The first housekeeper on the show, Florida, had been spun off to her own series, Good Times, and replaced by Mrs. Naugatuck, who I thought was very funny. In my script, I had not made the mistake of basing the entire story on one character — that's a no-no in a spec script because you want to show you can handle all of them — but the feisty cleaning lady was central to the plot.

One nice thing about having a "connected" agent like Bernie was that things happen fast. He messengered my script over to the show's producer who read it that very night. The next morning, Bernie called to say, "He thought your script was very well-written." Since he led with that and not with "you got a job," I sensed a significant "but" coming…

"But we were too late. They filled their last open story editor slot yesterday."

Okay, fine, I thought. I knew that was a possibility. But what about just writing for the show? And though shows rarely buy spec scripts, you always fantasize that they'll think yours is so spectacular, they'll make an exception. Or at the very least, they'll say, "This is so close to what we need, we have to have you come in and we'll find a story for you to write for us." Either of those would have been a perfectly fine result.

Bernie began reading me a note from the producer and he later sent me a copy. It said, "Mark has obviously studied the show well but in his script, he does so many things that we no longer want to do with the show, including the fact that we've decided to drop Mrs. Naugatuck. Last week, we had a meeting where we discussed ten different things that we want to stay away from in the new season and I think he did all ten." (They later apparently changed their mind about dropping Mrs. Naugatuck because she remained on the series, though in what seemed to me a reduced role.)

Also, he said, they already had a script in the works for the new season that was in the same arena as mine. That happens often. Around this time, Bernie's partner Stu sent me in to see about writing an episode of What's Happening? and I went in with six ideas for episodes. One, they hated. The other five were all too close to other stories they already had in the pipeline.

The note from the Maude producer did include a nice consolation prize and reason to believe I might still write for the series. As soon as they were ready to start "breaking" new stories, they wanted to talk to me about maybe doing one of them. For the moment though, they were too busy for that. Two months later when they did invite me to pitch ideas, I was the one who was too busy.

Okay. A couple of things to note here…

• I had darn near every possible access and consideration a writer seeking a job on Maude could have and…
• The producer thought my sample script was "well-written" but…
• I still never wound up writing for Maude but…
• That spec script was by no means a waste of time.

On that last point: Stu and Bernie were able to use it to get me a lot of other work. I suspect it also helped convince them that I was worth trying to sell as a single. When a team splits up, often one member of it proves to be half-a-writer or less on his own. Stu and Bernie had one of the top agencies at the time and if Bernie hadn't liked what I'd written and if the guys at Maude hadn't been at least a bit impressed, I suspect I'd have had to go look for a new agent. It was worth writing for that reason alone.

That Maude hadn't swooped me up instantly did not discourage my agents or me. As most teachers of TV writing will tell you, a spec script usually does not impress the folks in charge of that particular show. They have their own proprietary views of their show and where they want it to go at the moment.

You, not being on the inside, are usually out of the loop on that, trying to write the show as it was in the past.  A producer of some other sitcom who read my Maude script wouldn't think, "Oh, he did all ten things they want to stop doing on the show." He'd more likely (I'd hope) think, "Boy, this guy really captured the Maude series. Maybe he could do that with our show."

That may cause some of you to wonder why Bernie had me write a Maude to submit to the Maude staff and not, say, a Mary Tyler Moore Show. And the answer to that is that in this case, he knew they were looking for a story editor who really knew their characters well. If he'd just been trying to get me a freelance assignment, a Mary might have been better…though even my outta-date Maude did get me an invite to come in and pitch ideas.

Today, I might not write a spec for an existing show. What producers want to see seems to have changed and today, I might write the pilot for a series of my own invention or a TV-movie script or something else original.  That seems to be the norm these days but in the seventies, they wanted spec scripts for existing shows.

As spec work goes, this was a good gamble, one of the better ones I've taken.  What would a bad gamble look like?  I will be devoting the next column in this series to that question but here's a preview.  It would involve one or more of the following situations…

• You're writing something which if one particular buyer doesn't buy it, you can't really sell it anywhere else.
• You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all.
• You're writing something and your fee, if they like the work, has yet to be determined.
• You're writing something for people who, if they do like your work, might not have the money to pay you.
• You're writing something where the terms of employment — who'll own it, credits, whether you receive royalties (and if so, how much), how many rewrites they can demand of you, etc. — have yet to be determined.
• You're writing something for people who really aren't sure what they want.
• You're writing something for people who just might not even read what you hand in…or have it read by someone with actual hiring/power in their company.
• You're writing something for people who are soliciting so many auditions and so much spec work that the odds are pretty damned daunting.

If one or two of those things is true, it might be a bad gamble.  If three or more apply, well…it's your time to waste.  But like I said, I think most writers who are looking for work expend way too much time 'n' energy on endeavors that are unlikely to lead to real, paying jobs.  In the next one of these, we'll talk more about bad gambles.

Paul Rubin teaches people to fly.  Without a plane…

As Ed Kilgore notes, Republicans are arguing over what will and won't be in the party platform that will be accepted in Cleveland.  And as we've all heard, Bernie Sanders and his supporters have been haggling over the Democratic platform.  My question is "Why?"

Does anybody govern or even really campaign over what's in the party platform?  Does anyone even read it?  When Bob Dole was the G.O.P. nominee, he famously said he hadn't.  Do we expect either Mr. Trump or Ms. Clinton to actually do anything because it's in their party's platform?  I can't recall that ever happening.  I don't know why Senator Sanders expended any of his political capital in forcing things into the platform.

I wish the platform did reflect the candidate's positions because at least we could read them there.  I don't know as much about what Hillary would do as prez as I'd like.  In the case of Donald, he says things, then walks them back or denies he said them.  Wouldn't it be nice to have his positions and promises in writing and in clear language?

But at each convention, the platform will be discussed and debated and some people will get furious and threaten to walk out if this is in or that isn't.  Then each nominee will vow to campaign on it and uphold its provisions and then everyone will ignore it and do whatever they want.  I am not being facetious here.  Well, I'm not being any more facetious than I usually am.  I really don't understand why parties even have platforms if everyone treats them like the user agreement for iTunes.

So I ordered some computer parts from Best Buy and they were scheduled for delivery yesterday. When they didn't arrive, I went to the website, used the postal tracking feature and found this…

"Train derailment???"  I went Googling and found out that there was a "large-scale train derailment" on Tuesday around 8:40 AM near the town of Panhandle, Texas which is located about 25 miles northeast of Amarillo.  It was caused by a head-on collision involving two freight trains, leading to a huge fireball rising into the air and a "fair-sized" blaze on the ground which engulfed most of both trains. Here's a photo of the crash site…

But based on the Departure Scan time on the site, I think it's safe to assume that my parcel wasn't on one of the trains that crashed.  Mine was on another train that was delayed or rerouted or something due to the accident.  Let's see how long it's delayed.

I haven't done one of these lately but I'm sure you've had no trouble finding examples on your own.

Today's has to do with Trump's assertions that he's in favor of waterboarding — "and worse." It does not seem to matter to him that he's advocating for the U.S. committing war crimes…the kind of practices that we cite to prove that Nazis or other savage entities are or were evil and that they're the bad guys because they do that and we're the good guys because we don't.

It also doesn't seem to matter that inquiries like the Senate report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program concluded torture just plain didn't work; that whatever information it produced was highly unreliable.

Ed Kilgore wonders why Trump would stake out such a position when there's zero evidence that voters prefer that approach over the legal, less barbaric options. I think it's simple. Trump knows that the kind of people who turn out for Donald Trump rallies will cheer that position. Some of them like the idea of America just being a big tough guy bully who'll step on anyone who crosses us. And some of them just like the idea of torturing and maybe killing foreigners.

It has long seemed to me that Mr. Trump says a lot of the nutty things that he says for no other reason than that he thinks they'll get cheers from the people at the rally and also get him press coverage. He's right about that. He also seems to think that by getting both those things, he will get to be President of the United States. I think hope he's wrong about that.

Danny Roque is a local (to Los Angeles) singer-comic who years ago wrote a zippy little tune about his favorite place to eat. The song was popular and Danny yearned to make a music video of it, shot in that favorite dining place of his. It took him years but he finally got the necessary permissions. I think this is just wonderful…

The first Marx Brothers movie was The Cocoanuts, right? No, not right. Before that, the four brothers shot a silent film (for a company they founded) called Humor Risk. It is a lost film — no copies are known to exist — and if what Groucho said about it is to believed, no great loss.

But is Groucho to be believed? Maybe not. Marxian scholar Matthew Coniam runs down what is known about this movie we'll probably never see. Thanks to Ken Plume for letting me know about this article..

At the signing for Paul Dini's book — which is looking like one of the best-selling graphic novels of all time — I got into a discussion with a group of people talking about late night TV, a frequent topic in my life. We were discussing Colbert and Meyers and Conan and guys named Jimmy or James. Then someone asked me what David Letterman was doing these days and I said, "Mostly taking it easy and spending time with his family, plus he was all over the Indianapolis 500, as he usually is."

Then a woman who was listening to all this said, "He's got that beer commercial running now."

We all told her, "Dave isn't doing beer commercials."

She said, "Of course he is. It's on all the time. It's David Letterman and he's selling beer." We all assured her she was wrong but she was sure she was right.

A few minutes ago, I was watching last night's Nightly Show and I saw a commercial for Traveler Shandy, which I guess is some kind of ale. It features this fellow, who I guess is an exec with the company…

And I suddenly realized why that lady thought what she thought.

I'm going to be on the radio next week. My longtime pal Ken Gale used to host a great show devoted to comics on WBAI in New York. It was called 'Nuff Said! and on it, he interviewed many great comic book creators…and me. I wish he was still doing it. But what he is doing is guest-hosting a WBAI show called The Hour of the Wolf that airs, depending on our point of view, with really, really late on Wednesday night or really, really early on Thursday morning. It's 1:30 AM New York time and I'll be on the phone talking about…well, whatever Ken asks me about. I'll remind you again before it happens.

That's WBAI, tidily located at 99.5 on the FM dial or you can listen online at www.wbai.org.

Jeff Ross is one of my favorite current comedians…and no, I have no idea why he seems to be trying to change his appearance to look more like Jackie Coogan on The Addams Family. Last October, he appeared briefly at an event in Hollywood called Politicon, about which I heard nothing. It was apparently two days out in Pasadena with speeches by most of the talking heads you see on cable news programs. Anyway, here's Jeff doing nine minutes of funny, topical poor taste…

Are you laboring under the impression that yesterday Nate Silver predicted Hillary Clinton would win? Well, not quite. He said there was an 80% chance of it and it does sometimes rain on days when there's a 20% chance of rain.

More importantly, that's a forecast that is subject to change as the election progresses. Things almost certainly will change — and probably in both directions one or more times before November. In fact, a forecast like this may cause things to change…say, if it causes campaign donors to donate more or less in some direction or if it prompts a candidate to alter their strategy. So don't celebrate or mourn just yet.

Ed Kilgore amplifies on this topic. And here, Silver and his staff discuss it in greater detail.

Like everyone who's no longer in school, I had a lot of different teachers back when I was — some good teachers, some not so good. Quite a few of them had no impact on me at all other than to drag me through some class that I was required to take. I suppose the one whose teachings had the most lasting impact on me was Mrs. Grandholme, who taught me touch-typing. I have never used anything taught to me in the realm of Physics or Chemistry but at this very moment, I am using a skill I owe in large part to Mrs. Grandholme.

The runner-up would probably be Mr. Cline, who taught English and History at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High. He imparted little useful info to me but he still left a lasting impression. It didn't have much to do with English or History and I'm still trying decide if it was for the better.

First thing I should do here is to give you a visual. He looked very much like Norman Lear, minus the silly hat. Here — study this picture…

Got him? Okay. Then I should tell you this about Mr. Cline: He was a very funny teacher and oh, how he loved to perform in front of the class. I think deep down, he wanted to be an actor or a comedian…and one year when he emceed a big talent show and fund-raising event in the school auditorium, he was terrific. Campus legend had it that years earlier, one of those events was hosted by Jerry Lewis. I wasn't there to see that but if it did happen, I'll bet Jerry wasn't half as funny as Mr. Cline. (Come to think of it, I've seen Jerry not be half as funny as cold sores.)

Third thing I have to tell you about Mr. Cline: A lot of kids in his classes really hated him and at times, I was one of them.

I found myself, not by choice, in a number of his classes over the years. He started each one the same way: "You can be a pupil or you can be a student." The difference in his mind was that a pupil just sits there and listens and does the work and waits to be taught. A student wants to learn and actively participates and does more than is expected. "I teach my classes for students," he said over and over, putting a special, revered emphasis on the word "students." To that end, he did things like this…

One Monday in History class, he assigned us to read Chapter Four in our textbooks and warned us there would be a test the next day. And indeed on Tuesday, there was a test — on Chapter Five. Because a student would have read ahead.

Another time, he assigned Chapter Six and most of us — by now, hip to the game — read Six and Seven. The test the next day was actually on Chapter Six but the test consisted of one line: "Write down five interesting things you learned from reading that chapter." That's harder to do than you imagine…and I failed because two of the five things I wrote down were actually in Chapter Seven. Because a student would have remembered which pages were which.

I mean, after all! What good is a piece of knowledge if you don't remember which chapter of one book it appeared in?

Yet another time, he assigned us to write an essay that was due on Friday and then on Thursday, he announced he would collect them then. Anyone who couldn't hand his or her essay in a day early would receive a lower grade when he or she did. Because a student wouldn't have waited until the last minute to complete it.

I'm sure his motives were good. I'm sure he thought he was encouraging us to become more inquisitive and serious about learning. But it sure didn't seem to me like that was the outcome.

It seemed to me like he was prompting us to think of everything as a big game where the person in charge — in this case, him — can change the rules whenever he feels like it. Life works that way at times and I suppose that could be a valuable lesson to keep in mind…but it got to be a terrible distraction from any possible actual learning. When I did read the textbook, I wasn't thinking "What can I learn from this?" I was thinking, "How will Mr. Cline screw with us over this material?"

I don't remember very much that I learned in those classes of his. What I do remember are his silly little gotchas like the one in an English class near the end of the semester. He passed out forms and told us to write down the names and brief summaries of all the books we'd read that term. No particular quantity of reading had ever been assigned to us but a student would have been reading many books all year. So we had to make out a list and then he graded us on the quantity of books and also on whether he thought we were reading at the proper level.

I got an "A" on that one, partly because I had read about five good books and partly because I was good at making up phony book titles and fake author names for about seven more. He couldn't very well fault my choice of books he'd never heard of so he gave me high marks for them. I had to resist the temptation to go to him and say that while a student might not have fibbed about what books he'd read, a good teacher would have gone to the school library and looked up titles with which he was not familiar.

I "won" that skirmish but I didn't fare so well the time he ordered us to hand in the notes we'd taken on his previous day's lecture. He hadn't told us to take notes but, he said, a student would have taken extensive, detailed notes. So he was going to grade us on how many notes we'd taken and how detailed they were.

I had taken almost none and what I had written down was in a shorthand style that only I would understand: Key words to jog my memory instead of full quotes and sentences. Mr. Cline had never lectured us on any "right" way to take notes but we were faulted if we hadn't written them the way he thought they should be taken. That time, I decided I had to actually confront him.

After class, while everyone else went to lunch, I went to him and said, "I don't understand why I'm getting graded on a basis other than whether I do the work you assign and understand it. I get the feeling you're going to flunk me because I'm wearing a green shirt and you suddenly announce that a student would have worn a blue one today."

I'll say this for Mr. Cline: You could talk to him like this. I couldn't have had this conversation with a lot of my teachers because many of them had this "Me Teacher, Me Know Everything" attitude. Not Mr. Cline. He prided himself on encouraging his charges to think and question and I respected him for that even though I often thought he was achieving the opposite of that goal.

He explained to me that day why he taught the way he taught and stated, as if quoting something in the Bill of Rights, "A student is someone who takes detailed, extensive notes."

I said, "How about this? A student is someone who learns. You know, a minimum-wage stenographer could have taken down every word you said and not retain one of them. Which of these would you prefer I be?"

I remember that moment. I remember several such moments in my childhood — moments that made me realize that grown-ups and adults and parents and people in power weren't always right.

They weren't always wrong, either. It was important not to fall into the trap of thinking that, too…but it was important to me to fully embrace the concept that they weren't always right and that I needed to question what they said. (Later, it was important to learn — or at least try to learn — to do that in a constructive, non-confrontational way. I still sometimes have trouble with that part.)

When I said that line to Mr. Cline about the minimum-wage stenographer, he looked like I'd slapped him. Then he stammered back a reply: "If you don't take detailed notes, how will you retain what you learn in my class?"

I said, "By listening instead of writing. Ask me a question about what you said in class yesterday."

He asked a question and I managed to answer it correctly with a close-to-verbatim recitation of his actual words. Some of that was luck but I do have a pretty good memory. It's not flawless and there are times when it simply doesn't record things in the first place. But it's pretty good now and it was even better then, especially when I was listening instead of writing things down. And no, I don't remember what question he asked me and I don't remember what I said in reply that day.

As I'm explaining here, I don't remember much of anything Mr. Cline taught me. Just these things I'm telling you now because the long-forgotten things were of no apparent use to me. This "lesson" was.

I think after I answered his question correctly, I pointed to my head and said something to him like, "I took my notes up here. Would you rather I'd taken them on paper instead? Because I can't do both and like every single student you ever had, the minute I'm out of your class, my notebook's going in the wastebasket. With luck though, I'll keep my brain with me for the rest of my life."

During my school years, I argued a lot with teachers and I lost a lot of the arguments, often (but not always) because I was wrong. In that same high school, I got into a nastier-than-it-should-have-been quarrel with an Art Teacher who was very nice and caring and who didn't deserve the crap I gave her over some assignments to design what they then called "psychedelic art." I was politically very conservative back then and really, really uncomfy with all the glorification I saw around me — this was the late sixties — of drugs.

Today…well, today I still don't like 'em but my attitude now is what adults do in private is their business as long as it doesn't harm others. Even if I'd been right in '68, I was wrong to connect that to Mrs. Nichols urging us to create designs not unlike those by artists whose work was then described as "drug-inspired." I lost that spat and I deserved to.

I was wrong about a lot of things in high school. In fact, as I came to realize, high school is a great place to be wrong about things. Get as much of it as you can out of your system then because it matters a lot less there than it will after you've graduated and you're trying to arrange the rest of your life. Now when I'm wrong, I usually pay a much higher price.

To this day, I still think though that I was right with Mr. Cline and his silly (to me) way of teaching…or maybe partially right because maybe his method worked for some of the kids in his class. Keeping us off balance the way he did though seemed counter-productive to me. It caused me to not think of the material and to try to figure out the catch, the hidden trick, the way in which if I did exactly what I was supposed to do, I was going to be told I'd done the wrong thing.

And to this day, I often have that suspicion in my mind. When someone gives me an assignment that's due on Tuesday, I think, "Do I really have until Tuesday or are they going to fault me for not handing it on Monday?" Sometimes, I even forget that I'll be a hero if I hand it in on Thursday or Friday but it's exactly what they want.

I still haven't decided if this is a good thing or a bad thing. But it's one of those and either way, I have Mr. Cline to thank for it.

Hey, do you know what a Stage Automation Engineer does? Well, here's your chance to find out…

Nate Silver is starting to get serious about forecasting the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election. In fact, he's so serious that he's issuing two different kind of forecasts. Eventually, he says, they'll converge and become approximately the same but right now, his "Polls Only" forecast shows Hillary with 353 electoral votes as opposed to 183.7 for Trump with Gary Johnson getting a smidgen, whereas his "Polls Plus" forecast has her at 317.7 and Trump at 219.9 with Gary Johnson getting a smaller smidgen.

What's the difference between these two forecasts? "Polls Only" is just an aggregate of state polls which Silver and his crew have weighted to give more attention to some polls than others, based on their past accuracy, methodology, sample size and what they purport to be telling us. "Polls Plus" takes all that into account but also factors in certain data like demographics and economic trends.

Right now, you could say that it doesn't matter which one you believe. They both get us President Hillary by a landslide. Later on, one could indicate something that the other isn't telling us.

And there's also a "Now-cast" which shows the electoral totals if the election were to be held today. This could be extremely valuable if they suddenly decide to hold the election today. (Actually, the most interesting thing about this page is that it shows Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party getting 10.5% of the popular vote. I believe he needs to hit 15% to be included in the debates. That's not impossible.)

If you want to know how I look at all this — and I'm always surprised if anyone does — I think that Hillary will win in not a landslide but a tsunami if there isn't some major shakeup in what this election is about. I also think there will be a shakeup. By that, I'm thinking of another 9/11 or an assassination or actual proof that Hillary had Vince Foster murdered or a total collapse of the U.S. economy or something. A lot of people are saying that Trump won't change his game because he's not the kind of person who's used to changing his game. I think he's also not the kind of person who's used to losing so badly and so undeniably in public.

Something will have to happen and it may not be something he's capable of making happen. Which is not to say I don't think he'll try.

Kinda busy today. There may be a lot of such days between now and Comic-Con. Which reminds me: If you're going and you're thinking of attending either of my annual Cartoon Voices panels — the one on Saturday at 1 PM or the one on Sunday at 11:30 AM — I think I've assembled two of the strongest lineups ever. (We're not supposed to announce any programming schedules before the convention does but by now, most of you have figured out that I do certain panels every year and they're always in the same rooms on the same days at the same times.)

Lots of chatter about the Stephen Colbert situation discussed yesterday. In a day or three, I should have a new "Rejection" column up here in which I'll discuss writing on "spec" and when it's okay to do that. SPOILER ALERT: The answer is "Very Rarely."