That's great! I'm glad you are finding community. No doubt the social skills I'm just beginning to develop have had a huge role to play in my success, thus far.

More to the point for me, is that nobody gets paid just to show up, here. However, as you were saying, all the hard work goes only so far.

As far as all the work goes... I set a standard, "from day one", that that if my posts were going to be worth money, then they we're going to be properly cited, nicely edited and I had a vision in place of what I wanted to accomplish, regardless of "rewards". I want to creat material that will be valuable for the rest of all our lives, fuck the currency (but, no, I need that too!). Because no one knows me, it's not because I'm cool or or friends with everyone, it's about the writing, for me. So yeah I want to get paid, but that's really just my incentive system to bust ass and actually do the damn thing.

Previously, i got trapped in this situation where my success in life revolved around the fact (among other things) of knowing the right people, people knowing who I was, and looking the part (and just being around so long everyone was newer than me).

That was exactly what caused my ability to "produce" to suffer. It's good to start over, and I hope I don't have to make too many of the same mistakes again.