Having just seen not one but three videos in which writers offering “writing advice” were basically skewered as never-to-be-published money-hoarding imposters, I’m loathe to call this writing advice. I had thought a fun, light-hearted series on how to Be a Better Writer would be nice to do, since I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember and I’ve definitely gotten better as time went on. I thought I’d have some fun, get to play with some other writers, have some accountability for following my own advice, and maybe create some tools that other writers could use later if they couldn’t play along live that might yield me a whole $30 or something next month. What could go wrong?

Well, YouTube could go wrong. Writing advice apparently has become the scourge of the Internet and represents greedy talentless hacks attempting to prey on the desires of the innocent but probably also talentless hacks just arriving on the shores of I-Want-to-Be-a-Writer-Land. And god forbid that we offer a paid course or some kind of workbook that isn’t free, because you know us REAL writers are poor and LOVE it! We live for ART! Nobody needs MONEY, not even the “support me on Patreon” YouTubers who went all-in on this round of criticism! (IRONY IS SO F’ING DEAD.)

I’ll still offer advice on this blog, in the form of approaches that have worked for me and techniques I use for accountability and goal-setting and other writerly and writer-adjacent concepts. But we’re not going to call it writing advice, no no no no no.

So that means BaBW (Be a Better Writer, see a few posts back) is officially dead now and will not be happening. Which is okay. I have enough imposter syndrome that I wasn’t all that sure I could pull it off anyway, and I wasn’t really looking forward to it, although it’s what people seemed to want me to do. So now I’m just going to do what I want to do and hope you’re all here for the ride.

On the positive side, I’m reviving my Podcast, Read Write Geek, and will be posting the schedule for September very soon!