101 Reasons to Stop Writing

[This post will be updated as new Guest Posts are published.]

The burden of convincing a population of ambitious ostriches that every word they write is but another grain of sand weighing down their buried heads, is too great for any one man to bear. A lone individual is easily dismissed as a scoundrel and a lunatic; but two men who stand together, shoulder to shoulder against the tide of opposition and denial, is a Revolution.

Thus it was that Paul Riddell came to 101 Reasons, and the Stop Writing movement was born.

Paul’s special brand of Reality chili, served with complex analogy salsa and wrapped in a tortilla of painfully honest anecdotes, is the perfect alternative when you find my own brand of Give Up Your Hopeless Dreams (with a side of You Suck) is too sweet and easily digested.

Paul Riddell’s Guest Posts:

1. Slushpile Freakonomics — “That’s not to say that the enterprising wannabe can’t set himself up for a career of incredible bitterness or unrelenting fantasy in freelance writing. The problem here is the timing.”
    
2. The Aspie Dilemma – “For a group that prides itself on self-diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, wannabe writers sure have a problem with spotting patterns.”
    
3. Turds, Remainders and Other End-Products — “Just as no high matches that of the first byline spotting, nothing works better at crushing unjustified hubris than making a quick trip to the remainder bin.”
    
4. The Savings That Matter – “One business report after another makes much hay out of how smoking costs $X million in lost hours every year in the US, but nobody takes the time to research how many man-hours are lost every year to wannabe writers.”
    
5. Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? – “It’s not just enough to encourage the idea that the life work of most ‘writers’ are so foul that their work automatically gets dumped into a furnace somewhere: we should all encourage the idea that the torching will be a public event.”

These posts should at the very least dissuade you from ever introducing yourself as a writer, in case the person you’ve just met is Paul.