I wrote this a while ago, but since my old blog posts seem lost somewhere in the Mystery of Wordpress, I thought I'd repost the essence, here, again.

This is what's known as "repurposing" material.  It's quite popular among writers, even though (or maybe because) it's laziness masked as efficiency. 

I know two guys who make three bean salad.

A few years ago, they pooled their money, bought a small machine that fills jars, and they went into the three bean salad business.  They buy beans from some huge wholesaler, already cooked, and the machine dumps them into jars, fills the jars with pickling solution, seals the jars, and then another machine slaps a label on the jars that says something like, “Kountry Kupboard” three bean salad, or maybe “Artisan’s Pride Salad,” or maybe “Sunny Ridge Ranch Three Bean Salad” – I don’t know what the name is, only that it’s not from a sunny ridge or an artisan or a kountry kupboard, it’s from a machine that dumps wholesale beans from some gigantic industrial food company – something like, probably, Drax Chemical, Munitions, & Foodstuffs – and puts it in friendly jars.


And it’s good.  If you like that sort of thing.  So good, in fact, that a few years ago these guys got a visit from Wal*Mart, or someone like them, and they wanted to sell their three  bean salad in their gigantic stores that pepper the globe.

The rest of it is here, if you want to read it.  Or here, if you want to hear it.

But fair warning:  I’ve said some of this stuff before.  Well, okay, I’ve said all of it before.  I promise to get some new material soon.