This place really puzzles me

I am relatively new to this forum. When I was younger and a more successful writer (in that I was being published regularly and paid almost as much), I realized that I owed a lot of that success to the AOL Writer's Community. It led to my first steady gig, I met a lot of cool people, and I was even offered to be in the first Chicken Soup for the Soul -- but I had a paper due in high school and I passed on that one. Great call, Patton.

Anyway, I thought perhaps part of what I was missing was that online community of writers. Well, a community of writers in general, but like college for single mothers and troops in Iraq, online seems like the only option. I found this place when I was looking for information about an agency that is local to Pittsburgh, TriadaUS, and found a pretty good forum that went back about 5 years.

This looks familiar to a LOST tv show forum I used to find out spoilers and post from time to time with my rather funny screen name. It was overwhelming, these people would churn out sometimes 4000 word posts. So, when I saw that this forum was similar, I felt a little overwhelmed. If LOST nerds go overboard like that, what was a collection of verbose sesquipedalian writers going to be like.

Well, I found out and I am quite disappointed. You people are supposed to be (and I am aware most of you actually are) writers. If people can sneak five or ten minutes to converse with strangers about a fantasy TV-show (albeit a superiorly awesome fantasy tv-show) and write clever, thoughtful posts, why can't a group of writers? Short, sometimes trite, responses are the majority I have seen. Even the majority of replies I have received to my own posts have been snarky, argumentative, and fairly advice and welcome-free. Of course, I kind of bring out those qualities in most I meet and believe are, on one level or another, full of sh!t. However, the typical welcome message is something along the lines of "Hi!" "Welcome to the tea party!" or "this place is great." Seriously? I was online dating for a piece and read more substantive welcome messages than that. Real questions asked, especially by folks with that condescending "New kid, Be Gentle!" tag are direct to search the internet or look something up in the FAQs rather than give some useful advice. I mean, I value the verbal sparring from the bitchy posters more than that.

I'm gonna stick around (at least until I get banned for being incendiary), just to give this site a fair shot to provide something real other than just a venue for self-marketing in people's signatures (by the way, check out my blog The Last Rube, just click below in my signature!!!!).

Let's hope this generates some kind of reply. Good luck new writers and I am sure that if you are persistent you can find some folks here with good advice who are willing to share it. Try not to be discouraged and to hell with your critics. Never compromise. But, you then you usually stay broke. Write as much as you can, but try to do it for free (or something insulting like $15 for an article) as little as possible.

Maybe I just caught the site on a bad month or something, but I have been severely let down. It has real promise, but sometimes you have spend the time it takes for three Warren Zevon songs to play to write out one's thoughts.

Think of it as good practice. Now come and get me you vicious swine....

mscelina said:

Well, hello there, Josh.

I've gone back and read the posts in the threads you've posted in at AW to date, which is what? 14? Surely you're not upset because people disagreed with you, are you? Because, if you are, quite frankly that must be a detriment to developing mutually beneficial professional relationships.

The fact of the matter is that no matter where you go, people are going to disagree with you. If you do something like email a busy agency just as a hello while including links to your work and then get miffed because the agent rightfully assumed this was a query and rejected it...then people who are familiar with the industry and how publishing works are going to tell you that you were wrong. So now that your monologue was shut down in the agency's thread on the B&B forum, you're looking to continue the conversation. Since you found out that members can't start threads in TIO, you've started this thread in the newbie forum so that it can be moved to TIO and you can rip Cyia's red comments to your post merrily as you stated you wished to do...

*shakes head*

Welcome to AW. *grin* And good luck.

Click to expand...

First off, I am glad to see that I inspired some discussion. And it makes me smile. I am going to address you first MsCelina.

I am actually rather used to people disagreeing with me. And I don't know what a TIO is, but I do recall the conversation to which you refer. It was actually the first sign to me that something might be rotten in Denmark (or wherever this site is hosted), and it is what spurned my research. I post from time to time, but most of the time I simply read and this is my interpretation of what I read.

I was not miffed that the agency did not read my e-mail, just naive to think that they might. What I objected to was the attitude of the respondents to my post. One poster specifically stated that he or she did not have time to answer some stranger's questions...the irony of being on a forum designed to do just that must have escaped him.

When I started the AOL writer's community was just that. Having been a "professional" factotum at a number of places, I find that yes the same questions from different folks do tend to get annoying. However, this is why they are the important questions. Send someone to read the FAQ, but would it be so terrible to add some of your own thoughts or experiences. Hell, save the post as a text file. This way it can be personal and impersonal at the same time!