I have been on Medium for exactly one month now and I have enjoyed every minute of it. I have made enough money to pay the $5 Medium membership fee and I even have a little bit left over for a fancy cup of coffee and a treat.

When I first started out, I was really clueless about Medium but then I started reading all the articles about publishing, writing, gaining followers, and earning money on the site. I also picked up new terminology like the word ‘listicle’ and I learned the difference between self-publishing and writing for other publications.

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Some years ago, I was a budding PhD scientist in Chemistry trying to make it into the big leagues of academia. I never did make it but that’s another story. Anyway, what I needed most at that time was a recommendation letter. Whether you are applying for a research grant, a travel award, or some other academic benefit, the recommendation letter is an important footnote in the life of a young scientist. In my case, the letter would also carry more weight if it was written by a professor of the highest rank and order.

With this in mind, I…

I am either old or out of the loop because I had never heard of the word listicle until I started writing on Medium a few weeks ago. When I first heard of the word, I thought it was a joke. Why would you call something a listicle when it clearly rhymes with testicle?

Anyway, I found out soon enough that listicle is commonly used in the blogging world to mean an article made up of lists. On Medium, there seems to be two camps of people— those who are in favor of listicles and those who aren’t. It doesn’t…

There is nothing more terrifying to me than the pounding of my heart as the stories of ghosts, spirits, and demons come alive through the pages of a book. There is also nothing more offensive to me than the gruesome depictions of blood and gore that are becoming a staple of the horror genre these days.

In my opinion, the best horror books don’t have to resort to the cheap thrills of violence to instill fear in their readers. In fact, I notice that my fear is more pronounced when the horror is unknown and takes on the form of…

In one of the worst and most senseless crimes to occur in Hesperia, California, a baby girl lost her life because a psychopath felt that he was being ignored by his girlfriend and had to take out his anger on a baby.

In 2013, baby Scarlett was just a year old. Scarlett’s mother, Andrea, was a friend and neighbor to a woman called Terra. Terra had a boyfriend called Daniel Ruiz. Daniel was 25 years old.

One day on August 28, 2013, Daniel arrived at Terra’s apartment looking for her. Terra was with her neighbor, Andrea and the two women…

In high school, Ashley Paige Benton was described as the girl who looked like Angelina Jolie. However, her pretty looks belied her rough and tough nature and personality.

Ashley had a difficult childhood. Her parents got divorced when she was just two and her mother who was a jazz singer struggled to pay the bills and take care of Ashley. Ashley’s maternal grandmother would also try to take care of her but it was still difficult.

Ashley struggled in school. She was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and had to repeat third grade. When she got to middle school, she…

Anna Sorokin was born on January 23, 1991, in Moscow. Russia. Her father was a trucker and her mother owned a convenience store.

At school, Anna was known as a bright student who excelled in her grades. However, she also had an interest in fashion and reading glossy fashion magazines. Her favorite movie was Mean Girls and she liked to model herself after the mean girl characters in the movie.

In 2007, the family moved to Eschweiler, Germany where her father opened a heating and cooling business. The family was not rich by any means.

In Germany, Anna attended a…

In 2020, Danyal Hussein was just 18 years old when he decided to murder two sisters as part of a murderous pact with a mythical demon.

Hussein grew up in Blackheath, United Kingdom, as the eldest of four siblings. He had a troubled family life with reports of domestic disturbances in the household and the police being called a few times to keep the peace. Eventually, his parents split up when he was in his early teens.

As a teen, Hussein was a loner and his father was afraid that he had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd at…