Take my advice

I've certainly been reading a lot about writing and publishing lately — look for links to share with all of you out there, natch — and I've certainly noticed that a lot of it, as Richard Dansky points out, is a little, well, contradictory:

"In order to become a successful writer, you need to blog and tweet relentlessly. Or maybe you need to not be distracted by social media, and focus exclusively on your writing. You need to give your stuff away online in podcast and PDF format to spread word so people will pick up the hardcopy or ebook. You also need to not give your work away for free or do things "for the exposure", because that's not professional. The way to write is to write endlessly on your own to hone your craft. The way to write is to go the workshop route.

[...] The best thing you can do with this tsunami of writing advice is to look at it, to understand what it's actually suggesting you do, and then look at yourself. Figure out what you've got the time and the inclination and the bandwidth to do."

– Useful Writing Advice, 'Cause You Need More of It.

I think that's an eminently reasonable suggestion. People who think they've found the One True Way to do anything, even writing — maybe especially writing — tend to give me the heebie-jeebies anyway. (Yes, heebie-jeebies. That's a technical term. You know how Eskimos are supposed to have dozens of words for different kinds of snow? Well, it's like that with horror writers and different kinds of fear. Now you know.)

Anyway, yeah — if you read some piece of writing advice, and you can just feel yourself light up inside as the idea reverberates around your brain, if you find yourself thinking, yes, this makes sense, this is what I want to do — take it to heart. If it doesn't, don't worry about it.