A kid interested in what I do has asked me how to do it and I thought perhaps it might be something of general interest and so have replied, at length:

I'm interested in writing about cars for a living and hoping you can give me some advice since you've been there and are doing that. I'm still in high school but have been into cars as long as I can remember, probably because my dad is also. Any pointers would be great!

. . .

Hoo boy. Well, where to start? The best place is probably with a quote from the Doctor – Hunter Thompson – a writer who greatly influenced me when I was your age. He wrote: Writing is a hard dollar.

Indeed.

Especially now.

Hard enough it is to make a buck by the word in good times; much harder in bad times – and damned near impossible without selling your soul by bending knee to the current regime of Wokeness.

I "get away" with being a heretic because I am an established one. Like the Dr., I spent many years – decades – hoeing the fields, including stints writing for "mainstream" media, such as The Chicago Tribune, Detroit News/Free Press and – for a number of years, AOL – when AOL was the Internet. Prior to that, I served a tour as an editorial writer/columnist at The Washington Times in DC, the very heart of darkness. This I was able to do because when I did it, these publications were not yet in the grip of Wokeism and a heretic could get hired – and not fired for being one.

This is near-impossible now. Even the car press is Woke. If you were to be recognized as an unbeliever in the tenets of the Electric Car Cult, say – or "identified" as a straight white male, which would also identify you as a racist/white supremacist – you'd be shown the door if you ever got through it in the first place.