
Ask HN: How many of you are writers and what are you writing? - roryisok
Following the comments on https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13850693 made me realise that, like me, a lot of you HNers are writers too. I&#x27;m an unpublished novelist writing fiction, speculative and otherwise, and I&#x27;m curious to know what the rest of you are writing.<p>Fiction or Non-Fiction? Poetry or Prose? Blog entries or Encyclopaedias? Have any of you been published?
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jelliclesfarm
I write little stories about my farm for kids but it seems to resonate with
adults. I seem to get more reactions from adults than from children.One even
held my hands and started sobbing. I didn't know what to make of it..making
grown ups weep was certainly not my intent when I wrote them.

What I really like to write tho' is weird fiction. And I have..it feels too
personal to share. I don't think I will ever share it. It seems like it comes
from the darkest parts of me. I went through a lovecraft/m.r.james/algernon
phase and even though I moved past it..to try other authors and genres..I
never forgot how I felt when I first got started on weird fiction. It feels
the same way again when I dig deep and write little snippet stories for
myself.

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Mz
I do a lot of different writing. A lot of it could be called blogging, but
that doesn't really capture it. This is a partial list of my sites:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/my-
sites.html](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/my-sites.html)

I do freelance writing for pay.

I do resume work:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/resumes.html](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/resumes.html)

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kenshi
I have a directory of unpublished blog posts on my hard drive.

I also am writing and publishing (and not publicising yet) a series of blog
posts about developing software. When I have enough posts written I might
cross-publish them onto Medium or whatever the blog publishing platform of the
moment is.

I have notes and ideas of lots of (non-fiction) things I want to write about
more fully at some point.

And I would like to try my hand at writing some fiction. Sci-fi or fantasy
because it would be fun, I imagine.

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limedaring
I'm the author of Hello Web App
([http://hellowebapp.com](http://hellowebapp.com)) and I'm currently in the
middle of writing Hello Web Design
([http://hellowebdesignbook.com](http://hellowebdesignbook.com)), which I just
finished a Kickstarter campaign for last month.

Non-fiction books, self-published (I do the design for them as well).

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mattbgates
I write all the time, but nothing that would publish me a novel nor have I
been published anywhere professionally. When I was younger, I would write
short stories and stuff like that. Again, nothing worth making into a novel.

When I was in college, I had developed a fascination with wanting to help
college students establish their careers, or help people who were having a
midlife crisis and were in a career already change careers if they so desired,
or just to help make the workplace better.

Having gone to school for Psychology and after graduation, I was unable to get
a job and pursue it. Of course, it would have helped to have gone back for a
Masters Degree, but I had no money. So I did the next best thing: I was a
programmer at heart (teaching myself when I was young), so I used that
skillset to get a job.

However, my love and passion for wanting to understand and help people in the
workplace never died. So I did the next best thing: I created a website that
helped people with jobs, careers, and the workplace. I scoured the Internet
searching for a website similar to my idea, but I could only find individual
blog post articles related to the topics I was interested in writing about,
nothing that really made the entire website about the topics of jobs, careers,
and the workplace. Little did I know that there were many people who would
actually be interested in learning more about what I was interested in.

After writing dozens of articles and publishing them, I opened the blog up for
others to contribute. It has become like a full-time job but I love it. I am
sure so many people reading the website are encouraged to write their own
articles, and every experience at work helps me write yet another article. The
topics are endless and the ideas are endless.

So I basically write about work to help people deal with work. Articles like:
How do you ask for a raise? How do you impress your boss? How to deal with
back-stabbing co-workers? How to get along with your boss. and so on and so
forth. I'm hoping that one day if I ever do decide to go back for a Masters
Degree, I can use this information in some way for research purposes, but my
aim is to just make the place that we are at for nearly most of our lives,
40-50 hours a week + driving time a better place to be. The website has been
up for several years now and we just hit a benchmark of 1,500 posts.

Every week, I check my inbox, and I've got a ton of new articles that people
want to contribute! So this is not just my website, but it has turned into its
own community of contributors, and those contributors share with their friends
and following. Contributors include freelance writers, marketers, startups,
individuals (doctors, lawyers, professors, plumbers, electricians, CEOs, board
members, bosses, programmers, engineers, etc.), and even professional
researchers at some well known universities. I even get people from Canada,
Europe, Phillipines, India, Japan, and Australia who send in articles. I would
have never talked to these people otherwise. The diversity teaches me about
what work is like around the world. I don't do any marketing for it. I just
write and others write, and we share it with the world, and those who get it
love it.

[http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)

