Sean Lindsay
For the last four months Sean has been involved in a long-term study on the effects of not writing, conducted by social scientists at the University of Helsinki, Literary Psychology School. Though it is too early to discuss specifics, the results are encouraging, and it seems possible at this stage that former writers may be able to successfully transition back into mainstream society.

Paul Riddell
Though rejected as a subject in the same study, Paul Riddell has ceased writing on his own. He has eliminated writing in every form from his life — no blog, no books, no keyboard on his computer, no text messaging, no post-it notes. He only communicates orally, and even then only with people he isn’t tempted to punch in the mouth. He is presently working in plant genetics research, attempting to develop a gene therapy that will make trees impervious to woodchipping and pulping.

Stephen Jayson Harris
Stephen Harris recently resigned from his position as Books Editor for the Boise Gleaner, after the Books section was reduced from a quarter-page at the back of the International Finance section, down to a column heading in the Classifieds. He is suing the newspaper to regain rights to the backlog of book-related articles they’ve refused to publish, while covering the McCain campaign for New England Prose Poetry magazine.

Edgar Harris
It’s finally been conclusively proven that Edgar Harris, former sports editor for Science Fiction Age, never actually existed. “Edgar Harris” was the collective pseudonym used by a group of freelance writers who felt their science fiction sports coverage wasn’t being taken seriously by the Peabody panel. The group disbanded in 2002, leaving the “Edgar Harris” moniker to be abused by domain name squatters.

Sir Thomas DeKay
Having decided to update his resume, Sir Thomas has been diligently studying modern computing via the For Dummies book series (he is presently reading eBay PowerSeller Business Practices For Dummies). He expects to be able to post his own articles on this website, when he gets to Wordpress for Dummies. His latest volume of poetry, Inspired by The Predictions of the Death of Print, is seeking a publisher.

(BTW, I know I’m a day late. I’m also a dollar short.)

Last year, I marked the anniversary on this blog with an open thread, where just-for-the-heck-of-it I invited readers to say hello, and where they’re from. Some 65 people responded (and hundreds didn’t, the slackers), letting me know I have readers from all over the US, Canada, Australia, and readers from the UK, France, Spain and even Libya and Mozambique. Logorrhea is truly a global phenomenon.

Let’s do it again this year. Whether you’re a regular reader or you’ve just found this site after searching for "bad sci-fi writing cliche", take a minute to leave a comment.

Some suggested topics:

• the worst book you ever read (and why you read it)
• the thing that annoys you most about other writers
• what you hate most about this site

If you commented on last years’ thread, now’s the time to gloat about how you were reading the blog before the New York Times told you to.

Today’s highlights in history include the birth of a Nobel Prize winner and nominee, the death of a fabled warlord and the publication of the "first" Great American Novel.

In other news, the Demotivators page has been fully updated, and now shows all the Demotivators published on the old blogspot site, dating back to December 2006. They’re all available as desktop wallpaper, in normal and widescreen sizes.

… welcome. I’m here to help.

101 Reasons to Stop Writing is the online gathering point for a small but powerful cabal of publishing industry heavyweights, dedicated to filling in all the shallow parts of the pool of writing "talent". Unfortunately the site is also frequented by hundreds of wannabe writers, secretly hoping that their competition will get the message, while unshakeable in their own delusion that the site is not directed at them.

The questions you’re dying to ask, but won’t, are probably answered on the About This Blog page. Suffice it to say that:

• Yes, I’m serious.
• Yes, I mean You.

The blog is a work-in-progress, which is my way of saying that I’m a mite short of 101 in the Reasons department, thus far. Nos. 1-15 are listed on the Reasons page.

101 Reasons’ Demotivators are your fears and anxieties about your creative inadequacy, rendered in visual form and sized conveniently for display as your desktop background. A new Demotivator is published each month.

During November we celebrate National No Writing Month. We don’t celebrate NaNoWriMo.

If you like your news with tell-it-like-it-really-is commentary, the Weekend Updates cover all the publishing news you could possibly want to know, and a lot of stuff you’ll probably wish you could un-know.

Paul Riddell, former unhappy writer now happily retired, shares his unique perspective and insight, and the occasional stock tip, in his Guest Posts.

Visit our 101 Reasons Store for t-shirts, posters and other gift items that will help get the point across to a loved one. This month’s hot item is the Stop Writing 2008 Calendar, as featured in Paper Cuts, the New York Times Book Review blog.

101 Reasons is over a year old, with over 200 articles. The organisational structure of the archives is for shit at the moment, so if you want to know if your favourite author has been mentioned, please use the Search box in the sidebar.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the 101 Reasons feed to get full text updates. If you don’t know what a feed reader is, you can get updates via email, using the Subscribe box in the sidebar. Your email address will be kept private, and you won’t get spam. Not from here, anyway.

Your comments are invited, whether you agree with me or not. There’s a comment link at the bottom of every post. There’s also an option to rate each post.

You can abuse me privately at seanlindsay@101reasonstostopwriting.com

While you’ve been reading this, a virus embedded in the page automatically uploaded the last few paragraphs of your work in progress to me. Not going too well, is it?

101 Reasons started, essentially, as a way to have a conversation about writing with my good friend Lee Battersby, who lives on the other side of the Great Southern Continent, and is thus unavailable for the kind of meandering, caffeine- or beer-fueled conversations writers are prone to share. We’ve been friends half our lives now, and we share a marvellous synchronicity: our IQ’s and our final high school scores (out of 500) are within a point of each other’s, and somehow we’ve both been lucky enough to meet and marry a fabulous woman (each!), and have a large family. There are more similarities, but a full list would just be creepy.

However, despite meeting in a University writing class, our writing careers are wildly divergent. Studiously adhering to Heinlein’s Three Rules of Writing, Lee has become a successful writer on the Australian SF short fiction scene, with over 50 published stories and a short story collection to his credit, whereas I have barely bothered to finish a story, let alone submit one. He has taught at Clarion South, helping to train a new crop of Australia’s most talented SF writers, whereas I have taken it upon myself to try to reduce the world’s writing output.

I have described Lee as the inspiration for 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. There are two ways to take that, and I mean both of them.

When I wrote the introduction to 101 Reasons, just one year ago, the publishing industry and my life were quite different. Back in October 2006:

• We only assumed there was a link between really bad gore-porn horror fiction and mass murder. It hadn’t been proven.
• The SFWA had only demonstrated its incomprehensible ineptitude to its own members, not to writers everywhere, and the Internet at large.
• Kurt Vonnegut was one of the greatest writers alive.
• I entertained the faint hope that Dan Brown would be punished for plagiarising borrowing the plot of The Da Vinci Code from Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
• No-one at a major publishing house thought a “wiki novel” was a good idea.
• OJ Simpson was still looking for the real killers.
• Miss Snark was balancing professional optimism, personal cynicism and an obsessive dedication to her readers.
• Teenagers the world over hadn’t yet faced the sad realisation that they were too old to be excited about the last Harry Potter novel.
• I didn’t know who the hell Paul Riddell was.
• And I believed people when they said that four children wasn’t all that different to three.

It’s been an amazing year. I’ve learned that there are almost as many reasons to stop writing as there are bad writers who need to. When I began I had no idea if I could come up with one hundred and one reasons to stop writing, but now I wonder if I can restrict myself.

I’d like to thank the growing circle of publishing industry bloggers, who make my job easier by opening their office doors and letting us see just how insane the business really is. Credit is also due to the exploding field of blogging writers, both the professionals who let us see the realities of being a writer, and the (vastly more numerous) unpublished writers, whose arrogance, ignorance, denial and pseudo-profundity is an inexhaustible stream of good material for me.

A big thanks to everyone who’s linked here, or posted a comment. It’s your belief that you “get it” that provides the most amusement.

A tip of the hat to the inimitable Paul Riddell, who could run this blog by himself, if he’d thought of it first. He brings an unique combination of experience, philosophy, and a deep, world-weary resentment to his contributions that I have so far been unable to fake.

I love Ms Reasons. You would too, but she’s mine.

Here’s to another year (at least) of making the whiners cry. I’ll get to you eventually.

Now you can find out how many times I’ve lambasted James Patterson or Dan Brown, read all the Miss Snark advice I linked to, revisit Paul Riddell’s posts about Cat Piss Men, or do what everyone else does on the Internet and search for porn.

I’ve decided to document this shame with a new box in the sidebar, featuring a visual progress indicator for those of you who have trouble mentally calculating the ratio of 15 to 101, and an estimated completion date, which is currently predicting March 15, 2013. Holy crap. The Iraq War might be over by then.

If you only discovered this site in the last few months, you might wonder why updates are so sporadic. Well, the excuse I mentioned back in February has been unexpectedly persistent. I’ll elaborate on this in a Reason eventually, but the gist is this: you can write when you have children, depending on how much of an asshole you’re prepared to be. But if you have 2 or more very young children (in my case, 2 under 2, plus 2 older), trying to write will make you insane. I’m talking “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” insane. Don’t say no-one warned you.

There’s definitely a small possibility that this situation is going to improve over the next few months. We may even hit Reason #20 by the end of the year. I may even be able to clear the enormous backlog of half-written draft entries I’ve got. Who knows, maybe we’ll even see the return of the Weekend Updates, and an occasional interview.

Far bigger things than this have been promised and not delivered, by far richer men than I. In the realms of improbability, this is almost plausible.

By the way, I recently upgraded the blogging software this site runs on (Wordpress 2.3, if you’re interested) to allow proper “tagging” of articles, so you’ll be able to find related posts more easily. Over the next few weeks/months I’ll be going through the archives, adding tags, fixing spelling errors and formatting problems, and repairing some truncated entries. I mention this because:

If you subscribe to the 101 Reasons feed, you may notice old articles appearing in the feed over the next few weeks as they get updated. I’m sorry for this inconvenience.

Why the change?
• 101reasonstostopwriting.com is easier to remember, and marginally easier to type, than 101reasonstostopwriting.blogspot.com
• I have far more control over the design (Web 2.0 baby! Interactivity! Let’s leverage some synergies!)
• People take you more seriously when you spend $3.99 a month for hosting
• I’ll take it more seriously when I spend $3.99 a month to keep this going
• It stops some other prick from grabbing the domain

So, what’s new from your perspective?
• Comments are now posted on this site – instead of being bounced to a Blogger page.
• You can now receive updates via email, if you don’t use a feed reader.
• If you do use a feed reader, you can now subscribe to comments via feed.
• You can rate each post with a click.
• Look at it. It’s all shiny.

So, what can we expect?
• Same old shit, now all shiny.

Here’s what the critics are saying about the move to a new domain:

It’s a fucking retarded idea. You’re not making any money, why spend any when Blogger does it for free? All the inbound links will break, people will forget you, and they’ll all start writing again.

We’ll see.

I’ll update this post as new features are added.

Have an opinion about the new site, or the ridiculous delay in getting it online? Post a comment. It’ll feel like writing.

Respondents were permitted to choose more than one option, but the poll service counted each choice as a separate vote, making the results statistically meaningless. At least you couldn’t vote more than once (unless you’re cookiephobic), so we can be reasonably sure that 50+ people voted.

The Question: What do you want to see on 101 Reasons?

The Results:

25% (45 votes) More Reasons! I’m this close to quitting, I just need a push.

6% (10 votes) More Interviews, preferably with people I’ve heard of.

12% (21 votes) Weekend Updates! I need more stuff to procrastinate and obsess over.

30% (53 votes) Anything, just make it funny. I find your transparent sarcasm reassuring.

13% (24 votes) Anything, just make it cruel. My ego is overtaking my self-loathing.

2% (3 votes) More Polls! I like to know I’m not the only one here.

4% (8 votes) More personal stuff. I’m stalking you, but I’m lazy.

1% (1 votes) Generic blogosphere memes, punditry and other navel-gazing fluff. Got a cat?

2% (3 votes) Give up already. You haven’t saved one tortured adverb.

6% (10 votes) Would you review my manuscript?

Total votes: 178

Oh, you three people who voted for ‘Give up already’, you have cut me to the quick. You are the ointment in my fly. 

Although the methodology is deeply flawed, we can make up some interesting conclusions from these data.

Obviously, most of you want more Reasons, your writerly phantasies having survived #1-14 more or less intact. But can it be true that less than half the people who want funny also want cruel? (Reminds of an old Dave Allen joke, which I will humourlessly paraphrase thus: ‘Hurt me,’ said the masochist to the sadist, and the sadist said ‘No.’)

To the folks who voted for Weekend Updates, you may get your wish soon enough. To those who voted for more personal stuff, I say: pick up the damn phone. If you don’t know the number, it’s none of your damn business.

Manuscript review? If you think your ego can handle a serve of fresh, steaming reality from me, you may as well just keep submitting. The result is the same.