Confessions of a Medium Writer
After Sravani Saha’s Article By The Same Title
I will be ruthlessly honest.
I’ve been writing on Medium for about a year now. While I’ve absolutely loved the articles that have come my way from the home page and email dailies, and also the stumbling upon of one of the best and perhaps the only serious literature magazine on medium — Electric Literature, I’ve more dreads curled in my stomach than I initially thought I had, when I was reading Sravani’s satirical article. I figured, it’d be fun to write my own — humour to tackle the wanting of medium’s validation parameters — the bell with a green dot, bell bespangled by a green circle with numbers on it, number of claps, views on the article, and so on and so forth.
Publications Are Scary 😱
Publications are no better than literary submissions — you are better off forgetting that you ever submitted, until and only if you get accepted and the acceptance notification, like letters, pop up like an unexpected but delightful guest in your home.
I submit.
I wait.
I inquire.
I wait.
I wait.
I leave.
They did reply on the email to tell me that my story would soon be published. It wasn’t. On several inquiring emails, I wasn’t replied. So I did a go to hell to Editor@Coffeelicious
Many of the Medium Pubs are closed most time of the year. Talk about getting your dreams crushed of being read by thousands of people in a matter of hours.
Medium has to have a submittable like dashboard where publications can see who has submitted what. They should also have a feature where after a particular time period set by the Publication itself, if the writer has not been accepted or rejected, a notification is sent to both of them reminding the same over which the writer can inquire democratically. Also, I repeat, something like but better than submittable and SMedian has to happen.
Along with this, statuses to the submitted / received pieces should be set, something on the lines of received, editors are reading, rejected (with an optional medium editor field for why).
Email for all this need is preposterous. Would you ever email instead of instant message, an information of urgent importance, or even weird gifs?
A sour cherry on top of that is that, I fear I shouldn’t publish the story by myself at all, ever in the fear that it won’t be seen by anyone really. As Sravani says in her article
If it crosses the twelve hour mark, I start fighting my inner demons to resist the urge of publishing it myself.
I’ve written some thought provoking articles. So has my friend T'Obrahm. If it was not for The Writing Cooperative, those would not have meant anything, most probably.
I’m a writer who thinks he could write an interesting story about a person who is dictating the unfolding of events on a harsh winter evening by the road side of GT Road. The narration leads to a place where the person is chased away by a dog in presence of a dozen other people around, which is unlikeliest of event possible. I make it possible with an interesting twist at the end.
I can’t imagine myself even thinking about publishing it on Medium. I will approach traditional online ezines like The Bombay Review, or the warehousezine, and the likes. Unfortunately they are only open for irregular periods of times, no particularly good notification systems in place that will catch the followers instantaneously when they are. More, they’ll take an unknown amount of time either to break it uncertainly for good with a rejection or acceptance or not at all. I’m not complaining, just stating the facts. This has always been there. I thought Medium could change that. I think it can’t at this point of time. I can’t self publish and just relax as my stories or articles are circulated in the feeds of the people who might be interested to read it because I don’t think even my followers get it properly seen there, let alone other people. This is pure sadness.
I’m a top writer in Poetry, it feels like kidding.
Access Denied 🔐
Spotify isn’t launched in India yet, although most Indian artists are on it (*slow claps*). Medium uses Stripe to power its paywall, which is as good as nothing in countries where stripe doesn’t support payments yet. It’s nothing short of agony for some of us. Even if we had a decent chance to go out there, publish and have even the slightest chance to be seen, we couldn’t be paid for it on Medium, because for example — I live in India, and Medium has no plans to make public their plans about what they are doing about it. It could be that they aren’t doing anything at all. Who could tell?
Sravani sneers in her article
One clap!? Are you kidding me? A measly one clap? I never knew of people who could clap just once. Not even in real life.
I should start churning out hackneyed motivational gunk for the utterly mundane humans and get more eyeballs. I must write the Why’s of the How To of the How Tos.
May be I should do that do. But my conscience keeps me from it.
At the end right here, I detoured to Sravani’s profile to see her number of followers and claps on her article, both 3k+ and now I’m sulking with my legs pulled near the chest as I heave a long sigh, wondering why.
And on top of everything I’ve tried to shift my burden down in these words, medium tells me I can’t clap for my own story when I try to see who are the other people who did —
