/lit/ - Literature

Do you take your writing advice from actual successful writers or people who write guides for a living but have never achieved any measure of true literary success themselves?
I for one don't take advice from anyone and just make shit up as I go along

I bit on a pine needle to fill my mouth with the taste of sap. It wasn't exactly a pleasant to my palate, but lacking gum what else could I do?
Gravel made noise underfoot as Danny and I walked leisurely to the sandbox. He sniffed about intently. There's all manner of animals that walk about these parts at night, who knows what messages they left for a cat's nose to pick up on.
"Hey! Hey!" someone was shouting. Danny ignored it and kept up the cocksure walk all toms have, but I turned my head, spitting out the end of the pine needle from my mouth. It would only raise questions.
"You're the retard, right?" the man asked. His gut hung over a belt with a cellphone casing attached to it, his jeans were worn threadbare at the crotch. His face was red and his eyes squinty. There was a Charlotte Hornets cap on his head, covering what I knew to be a bald spot. Didn't remember his name, didn't care.
"No," I replied.
"Yeah, you're the fucking retard. Walking around barefoot like that? That's a retard thing to do. What, can't tie your shoelaces without mom's help?"
Mother was at the hospital after heart surgery, and I didn't appreciate this man's attitude. Danny, with his cat-typical inattention to human affairs, was walking up to the man to brush against his legs. I pulled back on the leash to keep him from going further. Danny responded by changing trajectory, as if it had always been his original intent to go sniff the slide.
"You know that cat of yours shits in the sandbox?"
"No, he doesn't. He's an indoor cat," I replied.
"He's fucking outside now, isn't he? And we found shit in there. So are you going to pay to have the sand replaced or what?"
I sighed.
"If it was cat shit, it wasn't ours. But I don't think it was cat shit. I saw the pictures in your little e-mail. Everyone did. Those little rounds things come out of rabbits, not cats."
He stepped closer to me. I could smell the beer on his breath now.
"You think you're pretty fucking clever, don't you retard?"
"Told you I'm not a retard."
"Shut the fuck up! Pay up or we're going to drive you and that whore of a mother of yours out of here. Our kids play in that sandbox."
"You don't have any kids," I said, knowing him to be a single man, a certified bachelor who spent an inordinate amount of time paying attention to the kids. He had the time, being unemployed.
"There's nothing to pay for at any rate," I added, pulled Danny closer and began to distance myself from him.
"I've got a gun."
He did. A regular old Glock. The kind of handgun that didn't have a safety on it. This gun was unsteadily being pointed in the general direction of me and Danny.
"Fucking retard," he said and pulled the trigger.
What a stupid way to go.