For writers, ageism is the worst. And utterly ridiculous.

Although this is about rampant age discrimination in Hollywood, it applies to all discrimination -- everywhere.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood...

In Filmland, everyone knows writers are at the bottom of the ladder. Never mind that First Came The Word stuff, the word is always first casualty.

Okay, I understand that one. With 100,000 new speculative scripts floating in the smog, at any given time; it's a supply and demand thing. Maybe 350 films are made a year, and a large percentage of those are from commissioned scripts. So maybe 150 new, spec scripts are actually purchased out of the 100,000 available. Much of that is our fault. We're driven to write anyway, so our writing serves purposes other than production. I accept that.

Writers seek publishers; this is a constant activity that many times has no results. It is true that some markets are in easy reach of most writers, especially in USA. In Europe things are slightly different; not all publishers possess an English language site and writers encounter problems in examining it and contacting the publisher.

In Greece, for example, most publishers’ sites are in Greek, and only the big publishers have built a multilingual site. In this case, writers can not research the market properly, let alone contact a publisher in Greece. Greece is a new exciting marketplace that all writers should be able to explore and, why not, find a suitable publisher for their work.

There are Greek publishers that seek foreign writers in order to get their work translated into Greek and then promote it in the Greek book market.

But how can writers find these publishers?

I have been looking around for sites on which I can generate some extra cash for writing, with varying degrees of success.

Here's my question: What do you folks think of sites that require exclusive content from their contributors?

In some cases, I'm OK with it. McSweeney's, for example, is a site that I plan to submit to eventually, and I don't mind that they require content exclusivity. They have the reputation to back it up, and although they don't offer compensation, the exposure would be great. That and the fact that Dave Eggers is behind McSweeney's, and he is on my top five living writers list.

In other cases, I'm not so sure. Triond, for example, rejected a piece that I wrote because it appeared on my blog (I didn't read the rules very closely, apparently). With so many fly-by-night companies, and companies that really don't have the pull to be able to get anything back to the writer for their effort, I am pretty skeptical.