(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

The Renown Margin

I am not famous.

But I do have a fol­low­ing that is grow­ing, a pub­lic per­sona that some peo­ple rec­og­nize, I run into strangers who know who I am, and have attract­ed enough atten­tion that not every inter­ac­tion is free of awk­ward­ness and some­times dis­com­fort. Mil­lions of peo­ple have read my work, and at the edges of my pedes­tri­an per­cep­tion of the world the edges have begun to crin­kle toward some­thing resem­bling fame.

This blog was always meant to be edu­ca­tion­al on the sur­face and the meta lev­el, both in being writ­ing about writ­ing as well as a real-time dis­clo­sure of what I find that works (lis­ti­cles like woah), what I find does­n’t (post­ing col­lege essays), and what deals are strange­ly Faus­t­ian (hel­lo Face­book). You see the excru­ci­at­ing glacial progress. No overnight suc­cess sto­ries here. If I start to carve out some­thing, you will see how it took me years of writ­ing every day to get there. You will watch me improve from old arti­cles to new. You will see my career as it hap­pens.

And now the first glim­mers of some­thing like fame are includ­ed in that career. Peo­ple who see me not as a per­son but as a filler for things (both good and bad) and as some­one who has some­thing they des­per­ate­ly want. So here are the arti­cles about that.

Intro
Groupie Three­some Jokes and oth­er Prob­lem­at­i­ca (Mail­box)
Pub­lic and Pri­vate
Unfriend­ed
The Armor I wish I Did­n’t Need
Eleven Rea­sons Fame Prob­a­bly Does­n’t Look Like You Think, Part 2, Part 3

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