Oh no! I got suckered again! It’s my own fault for not trusting my intuition. Stupid me…
I fancy myself as a writer, but not the most accomplished one. That’s partly why I write this blog and all the other blogs I’ve written over the years. I’ve written several books too, all self-published because I’m too impatient to go through the corporate publishing process which can take years.
But I WANT to be a better writer. I want to write a bestseller that raises millions of dollars in royalties to leave to my heirs.
In my delusion, I signed up and paid for an online writing course that automatically bills you every “semester.” In addition, you have to pay for another program that allows collaboration with instructors and yet another Zoom-like program for group work. Each of these requires that you pay for the “upgrade” to access the needed features. I’m not going to name this “company” because when I discovered it wasn’t what I thought it would be, I made a fuss, and they kindly said they would refund my exorbitant fee. So that’s fair. I won’t disgrace them online. If the refund comes through, I will be satisfied. I will have learned my lesson and hopefully will be more careful next time.
As you know, if you read my posts regularly, I have particular interests that I have worked hard throughout the years to master.
I am a good seamstress who has made many of her own clothes since the age of eleven, (later, even a wedding dress), and I’m about to embark on sewing docent costumes for a park district museum farm that my daughter manages.
I have been a computer geek since I bought a Texas Instruments 99 4-A from my (then) boss that his son had outgrown. That old computer used the old CPM system that preceded the DOS system that preceded Windows (or something like that). The little TI 99 4-A had a sound system so good that it could start earthquakes. It had Bulletin Boards that were replaced later with Chat Rooms. What fun.
Since then, I’ve had a used IBM that booted up from a floppy disk, a Zenith, a Micron, several Microsoft Surface computers, and numerous Hewlett-Packards (until they really screwed me over by sending me an off-the-shelf nothing-computer from China when I had ordered a very expensive Z-Book Studio with a 2-Terrabyte hard drive and lots of memory. Long story, but HP wouldn’t acknowledge its mistake even when I sent them paperwork proving the original order. Goodbye HP! I will never order anything from them ever again! I’m writing this happily on my beautiful reliable Lenovo.
That’s a long way of saying how I became a bit of a computer Geek through my insatiable curiosity about how things work.I found that I had a gift for writing in the 8th grade when I turned in a paper that was so good that the teacher read it before the whole class. (Understand that I was just a farm kid going to town school for the first time that year, and until then had been ignored by my classmates.) Later in life, I wrote mostly procedure manuals as a clinical instructor in a nursing school. Not until I was married with two children did I attempt my first novel.
So I WANT to be a better writer. I know it’s possible, but I will continue to explore my own path to getting there rather than relying on sophisticated marketing scams for inferior products that cannot possibly meet my needs.
The takeaway for you the reader is: Beware of what you read on the Internet. Anybody can set up a fake company and try to sucker you in while they laugh all the way to the bank. If you have fallen for one of these schemes, please share your story in the comments.
You are a terrific writer! You are a natural. The best kind of all. Do you still have that paper you wrote in 8th grade? What was it about?