Writing

Mental health quacks and money liars, I’m talking to you — Sorry. Rant. Sometimes things need to be said. Not that the offenders are going to listen. They never do. Back when Covid was new Medium used to put a green bar at the top of Covid posts if they weren’t by a verified professional. Don’t know if you’ve been here…

You can bizarrely trade your way to a bigger audience — There are people who blow up online in a year. My friend Dakota is one of them. From no audience in 2021 to $70,000 in a month in 2022/2023. It’s easy to brush off these stories and think they’re impossible. What’s odd is when you know these people before and…

The same story did well the first time and terribly the second time — Medium allows writers to publish stories for a second time, on the proviso that the original story has been deleted first. If you don’t delete, you are in breach of their duplicate content policy and could have your account suspended. So, on that basis, I’ve deleted and republished a few…

Part three of a four-part series about what goes into getting a TV series greenlit and a cautionary tale for screenwriters about what can happen when all their dreams come true. — On February 9th, 2011, I took a general meeting with two producers and their executives to discuss a potential collaboration. Seven-and-a-half months later, we sold a TV pilot to NBC inspired by Bram Stoker’s iconic horror novel…

So yesterday I went to the dermatologist… Hi guys, Thank you for bearing with me during a very difficult month. Yesterday, I finally got to see someone about the big ‘growth’ underneath my arm. It turns out that it wasn’t a wart. It was a very big cyst — in…

A critical discussion about using ChatGPT’s watermark in text-based content — In my last post, “AI-Generated Content: Catch Me If You Can,” I talked about how easy it is to avoid the AI detector. It will be easier, or we might already be able to do it with another tool that uses AI to rewrite the text. But it is necessary…

Screenplays to be honored at the 75th annual Writers Guild of America Award show on March 5, 2023. Here are the 2023 WGA Awards film nominees: ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Everything Everywhere All At Once Written by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert; A24 The Fabelmans Written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner; Universal…

During the last month, I have been asked several times how I can produce new data stories so often and regularly. Notably, most of my stories are made from templates, where only the datasets, data preparation, and (most importantly) results are different. Also, I prepared about 20 data stories during…