Good for you. One very OCCASIONALLY finds actual surgeons posting in the medicine newsgroups, but mostly a bunch of dumb farts who think they can cure cancer with echinacea, & one VERY occasionally finds working writers in the "writers" newsgroups, but mostly just wannabes who reinforce each others amateur standards & beliefs. It's generally to be expected that anyone in a How To Write Good newsgroup will speak loudest about How To Write Good when they've never figured out how to go about it at all, beyond the utterly democratic context of usenet, or posting their crap at websites. And frequently their delusions & ideas are so off the mark that they doom themselves through their own poor choices & mistaken beliefs, & really won't like the HONEST answer to such questions as "how do I get an agent" and other wannabe obsessions -- thus never can get can count working writers among their peers. But if they're talentless anyway, perhaps no reason to give them the correct information. Even so, misc.writing, in among the flamers & fools, is sometimes very comical (on purpose even), & a few genuinely charming people, with or without delusions of actual talent.
One of the books I was contracted for, which I turned in, was paid for it & spent the money, but which has been pending now for YEARS, was a guide to miniature vegetable gardening in finite innercity spaces -- it was such a cute book with tiny pictures of tiny veggies growing in tiny gardens, I just loved working on that project. It got to the point of galleys, & proof flats for the cover illustration -- then illness struck the publisher & they went from ten books a year to less than one a year. Every time I think about that little book I wish I could get the rights back as it would be so easy to sell again. But alas it was work for hire & I cannot just withdraw it from that publisher, even if they never do finish the project.
It's been years since I've had to garden in an ultra-finite space & even the yards I have now sometimes seem too limiting since I can't do such things as collect a whole bunch of beech tree cultivars, which I would certainly do if I had a lot of land. I wish I could plant a flowering understory in a surrounding piece of property that was half wilderness. I just want to spread out & spread out, & collect more trees as well as small things . . . if someday when I'm a feeb and have to garden only in a window box in the old folks home, I suppose I'll readjust, but cannot at present quite imagine it. If I ever sell the house we own now, the only thing that would make the disruption rewarding would be if the next place could be gigantic garden time.
A regular here, Valkyrie, went from big gardens to patio gardening, & her experiences shared in this group have many times gotten me thinking about whether I would get depressed about scaling down or just maximize the experience of smaller space & get just as much pleasure. People do adjust to much tougher things.
-paghat the ratgirl