How to Make Enemies for Life in a Three Minute Read

On becoming a famous writer with zero earnings

The title and sub-title are contradictory, but I bet they caught your attention!

I love irony! That’s because I’m a smooth operator.

I’ve been a serious writer for two years. Not to say I don’t write funny, peculiar, or humorous, too.

I’ll let my readers and fellow writers decide.

Without a track record of decades of publishing books, a memoir (sighs of relief all round), copy-writing (consumerism may have died prematurely) or anthologies (it’s on my fuckwit list), my confidence still wobbles when I see a title like:

How I Made (insert $ amount here) in (insert time frame here).

When I started out, I drank up every piece of writing advice I could find. But akin to my title and sub-title, conflicting opinions made my head spin.

• Churn out quantity. Publish 100 stories a day. Expose yourself.
• Quality trumps quantity (sorry, but your POTUS doesn’t hold Copywrite on that word and I misspelled it on purpose. It’s a pun. So is Trump.)
• Worship at the altar of Curation (not to be confused with Creation).
• No Top Writer status means you are doomed to eternal limbo — a state of purgatory from which you may never emerge.

I could have written an essay on how I earned 17 cents in my first month on Medium or how I gained 11 fans without ever having published a story on this platform. But I doubt anyone would have scrolled beyond the titles.

But this time you did, which proves I’ve learned a thing or three about titles and click-bait.

The title is misleading because I don’t want to bore you to death with a three-minute read or create enemies.

That’s not my writing style.

You can find plenty of writers who can do that.

Sherry McGuinn and P.G. Barnett have written tahrades (Texan drawl) against the newbies who brag and strut their slush, but those of you who know me will understand I lack the temerity to do that.

I quietly block or mute them and have removed Writing from my topics of interest — that way the advice I receive is via writers or publications I follow.

Moving on to the sub-title.

I’m not famous and I earn a dollar or two. (Though addicted to hyperbole.)

In the dim, distant past, I’ve enjoyed curation and top writer status. But my sojourn in the wilderness (way over 40 days) has led me to enlightenment: those symbols have minimal impact on earnings.

There was a time when I clung to them as a measure of my success and progress in playing with sequences of words and building sentences. I became despondent when they disappeared.

Big shout out for the encouragement and support I’ve received from fellow writers with decades more experience. You have been indispensable in boosting my self-confidence. I’m so fired up I now write poetry too!

You know who you are!

I won’t list how many publications I write for. It only matters to me because it’s a validation I have something worthwhile to offer.

But the best assessment of my progress is how many writers and readers follow me.

No need to quote the numbers. You can see them on my profile, but the steady growth month on month tells me I’m evolving, not dissolving.

My latest email from Neale Donald Walsch says, “progress is not measured in miles, it is measured in inches.”

Well, I’m relishing the practice of inching forward day by day!

I’ll continue writing until my last breath. I feel incomplete without it — the writing that is.

(If I didn’t breathe, I doubt I’d still be here.)

Thank you for reading and not getting pissed over the titles.