I don't trust Gotham; I think they may be... not a scam, but... skeevy.
I grok that.
Four hundred bucks is a lot of money. If you're going to drop that much money on learning to write, you should know who's teaching it and have confidence in their credentials --
and you should also have confidence in your fellow students, because much of your learning is going to come from them.
The Gotham courses don't seem to have any kind of screening process, which means that for your cash you're bound to get lumped in with people who barely know what nouns and verbs are. You can learn a lot from your peers, but you can't learn from idiots. And I'm sorry if my bluntness offends anyone, but there are a lot of idiots who want to learn to write, and these sorts of programs attract them like moths. You might still learn things from the course, but you'd be learning
in spite of your fellow students, not
from them, and that's suboptimal.
(This, by the way, was a problem I had with Critters too, when I participated in it several years ago. There are some brilliant, brilliant people there -- but Sturgeon's Law applies, and you get many more crits back along the lines of
"Woww. I reelly liked this peice, it made me wnt to read more. Only 1 prolbem: hwy was there a dog insted of a cat? I like cats more and I think you should chagne this if you want to sell.")
Clarion, VP, Odyssey, etc. are all more money and serious time. But one thing they all have going for them is the application process. You can't get in unless you first show that you know the basics and have some degree of spark -- and that means that the students can trust each other, and everybody learns more.