Apologies to @etiolation, if they are still around and it's a problem, for coopting this thread.

I want to start writing. My goal is to be a famous and well-compensated pundit with lots of beautiful young groupies and first class tickets spilling out of my inbox.

I'll settle for having a minor impact making someone's life a little better.

But, I really don't know how to get started in making it useful, how to engage in a broader community of writiers and develop and connect with an audience.

So I'm reaching out to the highest quality online community of which I am a part:

Is there anyone here who knows their writing has impacted another? Would you care to share the how's, the why's, and the wherefores?

Is anyone here a part of a writing group that's open to new members? Would you share?

Is there anywone here who has made money as a writer?

My particular writing focus is how to increase the level of "goodness" in the world. I don't even yet have a fully formed idea of what I think that is, perhaps a good topic for an essay. But, I don't even really know what an essay is. Somehow I got through a liberal arts education with decent grades, but don't seem to really know diddly squat about abstract thinking. More importantly, I don't have a well defined goal of the point of anything, with one exception: connection. The only time I truly feel at peace in this world is when I feel connected to another human. And it's a thing that perhaps a lot of folks take for granted, but which I was (presumably inadvertently) trained to avoid at all costs as very young person.

So, if you have any thoughts on how to develop focus and form, and identify venue, and raise profiles and get feedback, I'd be most obliged.

All the best and all the blessings

Dans la vie intérieure, le temps tient lieu d'espace.
(In the inner life, time takes the place of space.)
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce (Gravity and Grace)

Inside [the black hole's event horizon]… [what used to be a spatial
coordinate] is the time. … The singularity… is not a place in space; it
is a moment in time.
James B. Hartle, Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity

In my old poems I saw
the sentimental one
scenting sighs,    seeing scars
everywhere, twisting them
into words, arranging words
so they fit in a grid,
regular,    repeating.

Preoccupied, she wanted the answer
to the only question: What had made her
like this? An effect that sought the cause and
nothing else. Her city caught in a verdant
early summer day, light abounded; she
felt time had been running out silently.

How much has really changed ever since?

I now have an answer, and more.
She made me; cause, effect. Questions!
How will I be? What will I be?
What am I?

I am a tiny bit of what she wasn't:
the all-embracing space and time beyond
her self, her fear of being forgotten,
solitude unwitnessed, and pain futile.

I am not just her descendant either.
Holding her precious gift of exposed self,
I too am exposed to what I am not,
asking how much has changed, what I'm changing.

This is a new one I wrote today.

Edit: replaced one "the" with "an".