Courtesy Lindsey Snow

I became a full-time writer 17 years ago.

While covering consumer technology and video games as a twenty-something blogger, I would regularly receive hate mail from fanboys (never girls) who disagreed with my reporting.

I even received several death threats on occasion. While I never took these threats seriously, it never feels good to have your life, family, or property threatened.

After leaving video games in the late aughts, the hate mail mostly stopped. But I still get upset emails sometimes.

A few years a go, a man berated me for an article I wrote for CNN that was missing a comma. “You have no credibility,” the anonymous man concluded. “If you can’t master simple grammar, you have no business writing.”

He’s not the only one who has questioned my continued mistakes, two books, and thousands of published articles. In fact, the hate mail I’ve received far outweighs the fan mail—which is not unlike sustained rejection in general. Continue reading…