Posts by John Vorhaus
It’s your faithful correspondent, John “Sunny Boy” Vorhaus, coming to you live from Sofia, Bulgaria, where I have been hired to recruit and train writers for the Bulgarian version of Married… with Children. Since this whole part of my life, the part where I go running around the world teaching writers, flies in the face of the awful stigma, “those who can’t do, teach,” this month’s missive is especially directed at those of you who want to share your gifts through teaching but fear that it will, in some sense, distract you or divert you from your writer’s life. There’s certainly that risk, but the gain is so bountiful that I think you need to take that chance.
And I’m here to tell you that you can have it all.
So, “Sherman, set the way-back machine for 1989.” I’m teaching at the Writers Program of the UCLA Extension, while struggling to keep my TV writing career afloat. I was definitely burdened at the time by the above-referenced nostrum about how those who can’t do, blah, blah, blah. Then along came a student who blessed me by saying, “How about those who can do, do both?” The clouds parted, the sky turned blue, and my path suddenly became clear before me. I would spend half my time writing and half my time teaching, and I would have a balanced, fruitful life, and not go crazy. Life was good. Bar some random bumps in the road, life has been good ever since. I have built a body of work I can point to with satisfaction and I have introduced thousands of writers around the world to the idea that they, too, can live the writer’s life. I don’t know which achievement pleases me more. Both accomplishments occupy pride of place on my whole-life résumé. (The, whole-life résumé, by the way, is an awesome and fulfilling exercise; you should check it out.)
So now I’m in Bulgaria. I’m engaged in the daunting task of taking a 25-year-old television show that was never written with the rest of the world in mind and bringing into the here-and-now of a place where domestic sitcom production has yet to take root, or take flight, or take something, possibly strong analgesics, I know not what.
Read MoreSo I’ve finally released an eBook that’s gaining some modest traction. It’s called the little book of SITCOM, and since you’ve been looking over my shoulder for the past year or so as I’ve tried to start a fire in this little self-publishing model of mine, I thought I’d share both the story of how it came about and a couple of key lessons we can take away.
Years ago, as some of you know, I wrote a book called The Comic Toolbox: How To Be Funny Even If You’re Not. It was, and remains, a steady seller because it makes the inviting promise to new writers (both of comedy and not) that, hey, this is easy and you can do it, too. Well, the book came to the attention of some guys in London who were writing a book about writing situation comedy, and wanted to borrow a concept or two from my work. Of course I was flattered, and agreeable, but when I took a look at their manuscript, I realized that there was much more to say on the subject of sitcom than they had addressed in their slender (15,000 word) effort. So I proposed to write a “companion” to their book, of roughly the same length, amplifying and expanding upon their themes by sharing some of the tricks and tips I’ve accumulated in two decades of writing situation comedy and teaching others to do the same. For a percentage of their royalties, I would let them exploit my content in the United Kingdom, while reserving the right to publish it myself here at home. Of course the concepts of “there” and “here” are a bit murky on this globalized globe of ours, but in practical terms it came down to this: they got Amazon.co.uk and I got Amazon.com.
I sat down and whipped out the text in two weeks. It came in at 22,000 words, and I purposely put the word “little” in the title, so that buyers would know that they were getting a small, modestly priced workbook, and not some giant tome. Well, almost from the moment I released it, and without much marketing muscle from me, the book has turned into a steady seller. I think there are a few reasons for this.
Read MoreI keep this quote in my archives and refer to it often.
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
— Winston Churchill
It kills me to think that Winston Churchill, Mr. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” himself, should have the same adversarial relationship with writing as the rest of us. Apart from the times it’s fun, it’s a struggle, and if you find that tautology a little too tight, think about your own process: the days of pure joy when the words come flying off the page and splatter all over everything; and then those endless slogs through thickets of story problems or research or rewrites or whichever part of the writing process makes your spirit sag. I have one friend who’s devastated by endings. She just can’t seem to write the climax, even when she knows she knows it exactly. Another friend hates rewrites like a cat hates baths. For me, it’s picking up again after a long layoff. I have a bear of a time getting back in the groove, getting that engine chugging again. Lost momentum, you could say, is the part of the process that’s my master.
Right now I’m thinking it would be a worthwhile exercise to break down ol’ Winnie’s quote and investigate which particular part of the writing process is my toy and amusement, my mistress, my master and so on. Play along at home; my writing insights won’t be half as valuable to you as yours.
Toy and amusement: Not long ago I hatched the harebrained scheme to create a thousand new words by Christmas. In the heady early days of the project, it was certainly my toy and amusement, quickly yielding such treasures as harasshole (an authority hard-on with petty power), panticlimax (a dry hump), hactivity (the entire oeuvre of Dan Brown), and what I thought must’ve been hundreds of others. Then I did a quick count. Ah, 23 down, 977 to go. Thank goodness I didn’t specify Christmas of which year, but in any case I have a feeling this project will be with me long after the amusement fades away. (You can track its progress through Facebook or my Twitter feed.)
Read MoreWell, another month has passed. Another month of beating my head against sales and promotion when I’d rather be beating my head against words on the page. Another month of wrangling with production tools that, to say the least, don’t play to my strength. Another month of refining my new entrepreneurial model of selling my words directly to the world at large. Let’s call this column a progress report of sorts.
As of today, my novel World Series of Murder is available in three formats, eBook, author-narrated audio, and good ol’ dead tree via print-on-demand (more on that below). My rationale for having all these different versions available is not just to give readers (or listeners) every conceivable choice, but also to “triangulate on the target” in a certain sense, letting the fact of the book’s multiple availabilities lend a little legitimacy to the enterprise. Probably “legitimacy” shouldn’t be an issue to me, but it is and I’m determined to deal with it.
A few years ago, I was a budding novelist with a big-time publisher and high hopes. I thought that the release of The California Roll would make me a made guy. Well, if the book didn’t exactly sink like a stone, it sank like something not much lighter. Whether as a consequence of that or not (one wants to blame the market, recession, space aliens) I am presently bereft of publisher and must therefore self-publish or self-perish. Question: Must I also carry around the feeling of having been cashiered out of legit print?
I see the audio version in particular supporting the notion that this is a “real” book, and not some self-published castaway. Of course in a sense it is exactly a self-published castaway. I wrote it in 1998 and 1999, serializing chapters bi-monthly in Poker Digest magazine. The novel’s not a bad ride (poker, humor, murder – what’s not to like?) but it’s an early effort, and would likely not see light of day except under these particular market circumstances: Anyone can be a novelist, even those who already are. I have a trove of unexploited manuscripts on my computer’s hard drive. It’s time I found out if it’s even a modestly treasury trove.
Read MoreI’m writing to you today from my temporary office in Managua, Nicaragua. The office is alternately too hot or too cold, as the window-mounted air conditioner thwarts my every effort to find the “Goldilocks Setting,” the one where the temperature is just right. I’m here, as I have been some dozen times before, training writers and developing scripts for a Nicaraguan television show I co-created called Contracorriente – “Against the Tide”. Without going into all the nuts and bolts of this (though ask me to sometime; I live for the nuts and bolts), Contracorriente is an edgy drama about sweatshop labor, sexual abuse, gender identification, economic liberation for women, and the commercial sexual exploitation of adolescents. It’s pretty heavy. Pretty far removed from my sunshine noir novels and my comedy writing, from my plan to invent a thousand new words by Christmas, from my poker books, my tweets…hell, it’s pretty far removed from everything else I do in my life. As a non-profit project it doesn’t pay much, but I don’t mind because it’s materially helping the people of an impoverished, struggling country that, frankly, needs all the help it can get. The show’s roots go back to 2006, and lately I’ve been thinking about how much has changed for me since then…
Five years ago, I made half my money from poker-related enterprises. I was writing and profusely selling how-to books on the subject, pounding out articles for half a dozen poker magazines, blogging for a major poker website, and doing color commentary on poker TV broadcasts. The other half of my income came from Europe, where I traveled frequently to teach and train television writers or consult on TV projects –work not entirely different from what I’m doing in Nicaragua, but a damn sight more lucrative. From an income point of view, 2006 was a monster year, and I could afford the luxury of a Nicaraguan labor of love.
In the five years since, I have seen the publication of four novels, and as you know if you’ve been following these posts, this is something of which I am just inordinately proud. My other sources of income, though, the consulting and poker gigs, got pole-axed by, respectively, the global economic meltdown and the ban on internet poker. 2011 is not going down in the annals of my revenue streams as any sort of banner year. In some sense, I can no longer afford my Nicaraguan labor of love. Yet I continue with it. It’s good for my soul. It’s probably my ticket to heaven.
Read MoreI’m up to 233 Twitter followers, yay me. I give a lot of attention to my tweeps, and feed them a steady stream of entertaining true fact/bar facts, twitter-tales and newly invented words, interspersed with those not so entertaining but oh so critical calls to action (“Buy my book! No, that one! No, the other one!”) without which the whole endeavor would be a massive exercise in pointless self-indulgence. But you know what? There’s a massive element of self-indulgence in it anyhow, as I flatter myself to think that my mots are all that bon, that someone somewhere is hanging on my every tweet. (Well, why not? I mean, perpendiculous is a good word, and the world’s been crying out for it.) I confess that I take way more than inordinate pleasure in noting the addition of new followers. In the case of Twitter, then, I’ve found a way to strike a balance between grudging acceptance of a social network chore and genuine enjoyment in the task. File all of this under the heading of “getting used to the new model.”
And don’t think you’re not part of this. I’ve already told you that these monthly contributions to WriterUnboxed, and the immediate (and mostly positive) feedback I get make writing and posting these columns something I’ve really come to look forward to. Not only that, they really force me to focus and articulate my thoughts on what I’m going through as an author of the new model. Clarity? Never a bad idea. And the fact that some of you have joined my Cavalcade o’ Tweeps or friended me on Facebook or even – who knows? – bought one or another of my books or ebooks is just a certain sort of gravy on the cake. (And yes, that phrase was written exactly as intend because, among other things, these columns grant me full License to Whimsy, which license I never need to be coaxed to exploit.) So here again I have reached a rough accommodation between meeting my emotional and creative needs as a writer and carving out, by achingly slow degrees, a new way of selling myself to the world.
Read MoreAgainst all foreseeable odds, I have a hit on my hands. A bona fide, number one, widely reviewed and widely praised (well, widely within a rarefied world) hit. It happens to be a book about poker, and it happens to be a hit within that rarefied world largely on the strength of the public profile of my co-author, the wonderful and glamorous Annie Duke, she of Celebrity Apprentice and World Series of Poker fame; she of the 33,000 Twitter followers.
Decide is a case study in collaboration. I could never have written this book by myself. I don’t have the poker theory chops. Nor could Annie have written the book by herself. She doesn’t have the writing chops. Thanks to our complementary strengths and synergy, we have produced 425 of the most awesome pages on poker ever written. That said, the book goes nowhere without the public profile and muscle of Annie Duke behind it. It does no business; hell, it doesn’t even get published. In that sense, it’s a case study in everything we’ve been talking about in this column: how authors in today’s market are greatly aided by being broadly well known – or figuring out how to get well known. Anyway, thanks to Annie’s coattails, I have a book ranked number one (among poker books) on Amazon. (And more than half those sales are Kindle sales, for what that’s worth.) Decide to Play Great Poker has only been out for a couple of months, but it’s already clear that it will sell better than any of my other books. There’s a very good chance it’ll sell better than all of them put together.
I should be happy, and I am.
But I’m also perverse.
So when it occurred to me that there was a wonderful parody of the book to be written – a slender volume called Decide To Play Drunk Poker – I didn’t waste time. I sat right down and wrote it. Knocked it out in, basically, a long weekend, then spent a few weeks refining it, Kindlizing it, bastardizing the cover of Decide To Play Great Poker, and getting it up online, where it instantly commenced to sell literally tens of copies. Less than a month from conception to completion.
Less than one month.
Why was I in such a hurry?
Read MoreI’m not sure I should even be writing this column.
Years ago, with the first advent of such blogging tools as Blogspot and WordPress, I told myself that I would never write a blog, or even write any free content for the internet, because I was a professional writer, and I didn’t by gum believe in giving away my product for free. For awhile, I held to that model, and never posted any free content except to my own websites. The model worked pretty well, for I was and am a poker writer, and found many online avenues for exploiting both new poker content and my massive back-catalog. Even if I was only licensing columns for $30 per year per pop, it was revenue; a revenue stream. And when anyone approached me with the proposal of swapping, say, content for exposure or content for advertising, I told them that I had a “policy”: no free content.
The first self-inflicted chink in my armor came when I went to Romania to develop TV shows, and thought it was time to start a blog, just for the sake of telling the folks back home what I was up to. It didn’t take much time, and it didn’t cut into any of my markets, so I thought that was fine. But it was, in a sense, the start of a slippery slope.
The slope got much steeper and much slicker when my novel, The California Roll, came out, and my publishers’ publicists encouraged me to jump all over social media. Soon I was caught up in the “promotion” paradigm, and in the name of serving that paradigm, I started reaching out to websites far and wide with the promise of interviews, how-tos, guest-posts, and other forms of online content. This wasn’t the old magazine model of “25 cents a word.” This was – is – all free content, and I was persuaded – have been persuaded – that such outreach is a necessary evil for anyone who wants to sell words in the post-modern world. As are my Twitter and Facebook efforts, which don’t take much time, but do take some creativity (I try to make every tweet @TrueFactBarFact shine like a tiny diamond.)
So where my old business model was, “No free content ever,” my new model is “All free content all the time in the name of building my brand.”
I think my model is breaking down.
Read MoreI hope this cracks you up as much as it cracked me up. Well, it is an attempted scam and as the author of two con novels, I loves me my scams and maybe have a stronger affinity for them than you do. On the other hand, this incident speaks to the heart of the writer’s experience – the desire to trade words for money – so perhaps it’ll resonate for you, too.
See, I’m organizing a writing workshop, to be held in Pasadena, California, on August 13, 2011, and in the name of surfing the new paradigm, I’m attempting to promote and book the thing entirely online, leveraging the awesome power of Social Media. Those initial caps in “social media” are entirely gratuitous, I know, but somehow they seem called for; if I could slather the whole thing with reverb – Social-l-l Media-a-a! – I certainly would, for I’m counting on Social Media – Facebook, Google Groups, Meetup, and their thousand bastard cousins – to drive to my doorstep the literally tens of participants I need to break even on this venture. In the olden days, way-ay-ay back in the 20th century, I’d have been handing out fliers. Nowadays (-ays-ays – sorry, once you get stuck on a riff it’s hard-ard-ard to get off) I’m exploiting, or at least exploring, the functionality of Constant Contact.
So I registered with Constant Contact, set up the graphics, dialed in the content, and went live with my workshop, Living the Writer’s Life – Closing the Gap Between the Writer You Are and the Writer You Want to Be. I got my first response within minutes, and man was I psyched. Social Media! Yeah! Live leads, just like that! Let’s just see who took the bait…
Oops.
My dear soul mate (writes one Maxamina Mcalear)
I reside in losangeles also
and I feel you should read in detail this article
There followed a link, which of course I followed, because that’s the sort of doofus I am. Next thing I know, I’m looking at an exciting opportunity to get free government grants right from my own computer (-er-er-er)! All I have to do is download a certain e-book for just $2.97 (well, it’s cheaper than World Series of Murder) and all the riches of the internet can be mine. Financial independence! The freedom to live my life as I please! I can spend all my time writing! All for just $2.97.
Can you hear me sigh? Can hear me sigh from here?
Read MoreMan, have I had a frustrating day. Spent the better part of it beating my head against two things I’m not particularly good at: computer stuff, and graphics. Both are related to my current effort to get some items in my writer’s trunk out of the trunk and into the world of Kindle books. I’m excited about the prospect. I’m excited at the thought of making literally tens of dollars off some of my old work. But there are problems…so many problems.
In order to use Kindle (or any e-platform) effectively, you have to reformat your work to make it e-reader friendly, and while there’s tons of software and tutorials out there to help you do that, it helps if it’s something you have half an aptitude for in the first place. Which, well, I don’t. I mean, yeah, I can point and click, and I’m not afraid of computers. Heck, around my house I’m known as technical support. But any computer operation of this sort requires a lot of finagling with details, going back and trying again, reformatting, repositioning, recompiling, reposting, re- re- re- crap! That stuff comes easy to some. For me…not so much. And when I realized how much valuable time – writing time – I was spending on the effort, I decided to subcontract the project to the sort of people to whom that stuff comes easy. They don’t charge much…but it’ll keep me that much farther from profit on Kindle.
Now the cover. Man, I see the cover. I mean, I see the fricking cover in my mind’s eye. I see the type face, I see the graphics, I see my name in bold, the title, WORLD SERIES OF MURDER, I even see the little banner down at the bottom that says, Includes the Novella SURF LAS VEGAS! Trouble is, visualizing the cover and actualizing it are two very, very different things. Again, the tools are at my disposal – Photoshop or an incredible simulation – but mastery of them eludes me. And it’s ludicrous to think that I can learn how to use these new tools and produce a professional-looking cover at the very same time, on the very first try. I didn’t expect that level of achievement with my first book – a learning experience if ever there was one – why should I expect it of my first cover? Still I engaged in the aforementioned beating of head against hard object until my head began to ache. And when I realized how much valuable time – writing time! – I was spending on the effort, I decided to subcontract that project, too. Again, the costs are not so high, but…well, I’d better have a damn Kindle hit, that’s all I’m saying.
Read MoreLast time we talked about how important it is to stay in the moment, both in our writing lives and in our rest-of-our-lives lives. The example I gave was my own book launch for The Albuquerque Turkey, and my determination to say sufficiently present in the book launch events that I could enjoy them for what they were: high points of my life; things to be cherished.
Now it’s a month later. I’ve been to Santa Fe and back. I’ve launched the novel in Los Angeles. I’ve done guest blog posts from here to kingdom.com. I’ve done interviews, some fun, some stormy. (This one guy was just completely bent out of shape that no events in The Albuquerque Turkey actually take place in Albuquerque. I pointed out that no events in The China Syndrome take place in China. Things went downhill from there.) With everything I’ve done to promote my new book, I’ve stuck to my mantra, detach from outcome, and my motto, just have fun. (And if you want to know the difference between a mantra and a motto, mantras are more serious. But both are good.) I think I did a pretty good job. Anyway, I came through unscathed.
There were disappointments; there always are. As my agent recently said of the book publishing industry, “They’re redesigning the carpet while we’re standing on it.” Consequences of this? Independent bookstores are having trouble finding shelf space for titles like mine. Barnes & Noble is only distributing the book in the western United States. Why? Because it’s a western title, I guess, and wouldn’t appeal to readers east of the Mississippi. Well, crap. But then again, oh well, because that’s a thing I can’t control. (Apart from calling my next book The Whole United States of America Turkey.) (And by the way, never put the word Albuquerque in the title of a book. It’s too damn hard to spell, and I’ve had to spell it 23,323 times to date.)
There have been real thrills, too. My LA launch drew a large and enthusiastic crowd, one that went far beyond my you-have-to-come circle of family and friends. Son of a gun, I’ve got fans. How’d that happen?
Read MoreThis is the best part. The part where I get to say, “My new novel, The Albuquerque Turkey, is available in bookstores now.” This is the part where I get to sit on the Jay Leno set of my mind (as opposed to the Jay Leno set of real life, for I’m neither a starlet nor Charlie Sheen) and say, “Yep, I did it. That’s all me. That whole book, from cover to cover. Me.”
This is the best part. It comes at the end of a long string of not-the-best-parts, the seemingly endless struggle to find the right words, voice, characterization, plot, scene description, line of dialogue, even font. The struggle of facing the wave (the place where the words end and the blank page begins) day in and day out for a year. Then came the tedium of rewriting, the humbling act of taking notes, the million pencil proofs and niggling discussions about cover art and back matter. But now it’s here. Launch day. The best day of a writer’s life.
Unless it’s, you know, not.
Years ago, I was in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and I happened to find myself at a book launch party for a local author. He’d drawn a nice crowd; he was obviously well liked and well respected by his peers, and was rightfully enjoying the limelight. As anyone who’s ever had one can tell you (or as you know from your own experience) a book launch party is like a birthday party, only ten times better, because everyone has birthdays, but not everyone has books. When you’re the star of that show, you’re aware that you’re there on merit. So it’s a wonderful moment.
If you can stay in it.
That night in Newfoundland, the author’s publisher did him what I thought was a huge disservice. Raising her glass in toast, she voiced the earnest hope that in six months’ time, they’d all be congratulating one another on a big, fat, hairy bestseller. I happened to glance at the author just then, and saw his face fall. I thought I knew why. There he was, just trying to have a good time at his own party, when suddenly he was reminded of the massive expectations that he and others had inevitably heaped upon the book, expectations that might or might not be met, due to forces almost entirely outside his control. I saw his brows furrow in worry: What if it’s not a best seller? What if it crashes and burns? He accepted the toast for the well-intentioned well-wish it was, and gamely strove to put himself back in the party mood, but I could see that the damage had been done.
Not to put too fine a point on it, thinking about tomorrow can utterly ruin today.
Read MoreIf the writer’s gift is the gift to make choices, then the writer’s war is the struggle to make choices without going nuts. Without second guessing ourselves, annoying ourselves, stopping or subverting or diverting ourselves. If we succeed, then we communicate our thoughts in a meaningful way. If we fail…sigh…we try again, because we’re writers and we can’t stop writing. The writer’s gift is to make choices, but not the choice about that. As we discussed last time, if writing is our itch, then we simply have to scratch. And no amount of mental Benadryl can change that.
Meanwhile, back at the war, we find that we’re assailed on all fronts. Procrastination creeps through the lines. Doubt occupies the low ground. Bills come flying in like bullets. Metaphorical land mines (the worst kind!) block our path and also our Path. Inner terrorists lurk. Enemy personnel constantly advance, trying to seize or kill our time. And the trouble with these personnel is that they might have our best interests at heart: we do deserve a break; we have wanted to see that new film (or the ball game or the kids’ school play or whatever). But writing takes time, and anyone or anything stealing our time is, de facto, the enemy, even if also a frenemy.
Then again, as wars go this is a fun one because we really can’t get killed, and we do get to call the shots in a way that people who have only the desire and not the drive envy. Just ask the guys down at the tire shop. I’m sure they’ll tell you there are some terrific darn stories in tire repair, if only they had the wherewithal – no, the guts, I say – to write them down. They envy us our war because war, albeit hell, is not dull. Better yet, it’s a war we can’t ever totally lose. Just by putting words on the page – waging the war – we’re bound to advance on some fronts.
They may not be the fronts we expect, for this battlefield is fluid, and we never know where our breakthroughs may come. In fact, since part of being creative is taking oneself by surprise, we can expect to make breakthroughs in unexpected places. Especially if we’re expecting them.
Expect the unexpected? What’s that all about?
Read MoreKath here. Please welcome John Vorhaus to our list of valued contributors. He’s the author of the hilarious novel The California Roll (I call it smartass fic) and the Killer Poker series. John has guest posted with us twice this past year (click HERE and HERE), and we’ve loved his funny voice and valuable insights into publishing. A successful screenplay writer, novelist and humorist, John is sure to bring a different perspective and plenty of laughs to WU. We hope you agree. Take it away, John!
I’ll tell you the truth, if everything were going great in my writer’s life, I wouldn’t be writing this now. But I’m currently facing a challenge common to many writers – maybe one you yourself have faced, or are facing now. See, my last novel, The California Roll, launched with great expectations (and to terrific reviews) last year, but just didn’t perform as well as I (and my publisher!) (and my mother!) had hoped. While I’m inclined to blame this on everything and anything from Kindle to sunspots, the fact remains that what I thought would be an effortless and important jump up the ladder of my career instead turned into something I’m too familiar with: just another battle in the war that is the writer’s life. While there’s hope for the sequel novel, The Albuquerque Turkey (more adventures from master con artist Radar Hoverlander), due out in March, 2011, the circumstances remain the same: It’s fluffing hard to be a writer these days. It’s a battle; worse, it’s a war. And it’s inspired me to share some thoughts on this subject of the battle and the war of the writer’s life.
I start by asking myself a question: Why do I write? Some multiple choice answers come to mind:
A – easy money
B – can’t hold a real job
C – just want my voice to be heard
D – just sort of feel like I have to
I can’t use Answer A – easy money – for that would tab me as either naïve, deluded or perverse, and I’m none of these things (okay, perverse a little, but whatever). Answer B has some merit, for having written myself into the corner that’s called the writer’s life, there’s really not much I hold in the way of alternative marketable skills. It’s not like I can sell cars. Answer C sounds good – I just want my voice to be heard – for that’s true, I do. But the real answer for me is D, I just sort of feel like I have to. Writing is my passion or, on dark days like today, my compulsion. For better or worse, I’m stuck with it. And I know I’m not alone. So not alone. You’re right there with me, too.
Read More
