Kumbaya, brothers

Calling All Scribes — Hold Hands and Lift Me

It’s tax-deductible, consult your accountant, your mileage may vary, past performance etc. etc.

To our beloved Writing Community,

Thank you, all of you, for your wondrous generosity in lifting me to 100 followers. I’m a proud man. It was a tough thing to ask. But my three weeks on Medium have been an exhausting ordeal. Seventeen days, really. Rounded up.

Tinkering with my profile. Linking to Twitter. Hard work, peeps! And it demands creative energy. I just never imagined Medium would nickel and dime me by requiring 100 followers. Have they no decency?

But 173? Pinch me. I have 173 followers! Booyah! And all for a writer who only follows six people. I’m tearing up, just thinking about the wave of love coming at me. We did it, right? Together.

That’s what it’s all about, writers. Together.

After such a high, it’s with a sense of profound shock that I recently discovered Medium requires writers to publish work to get paid.

Work that must be read. By people, no less. Have you heard about this?

Colour me WTAF. Increasingly, in my seventeen-day-but-let’s-call-it-three-weeks tenure, I’ve sensed a bizarre malaise infecting this platform. Maybe you’ve noticed it. Have the people at the helm, complacent with their founders’ stock and newly blockchained NFT collections, forgotten who turns the millstones? Us. NaCl of the 3rd Rock. The writers who stitch the bits.

So, with a deja vu that might have led Yogi Berra to a trenchant maxim, I must reach out again to ask for help.

You have no idea how hard this is for me. In my house, we boys didn’t cry. Damn sure didn’t ask for help. Not if you wanted Dad to cough up a sawbuck for your weekly allowance. Honestly, you have no idea how hard it is to be a male growing up in middle-class America.

But I’m going to be brave here, and ask. It would mean so much to me, and you would have my — if not eternal, then at least for a month of Sundays and I’m not talking February, I’m talking May or October — gratitude if you could all send me some prose.

Which I can then publish.

We’re all in different places in life. Some of you, the more affluent, your lives rich with prose, can afford to send me entire pieces of work, complete with photographs. Which if copyrighted, I prefer properly credited — thanks, my dude!

But we’re not all wealthy. Many of us struggle to make ends meet. Challenging times, eh brother? And sister? Not to mention ze, hir, xe, and zem?

Also ve, faers, and perself?

So maybe you can send me just a section. Or a paragraph. I’ll cobble something together. I thrive on challenge.

Medium. Special place, right? You — the writers — would do anything to support your fellow writers.

Dare I say, even write for them.

For many of you, even a paragraph is a lot to ask. Believe me, I feel your pain. So if you can spare a sentence, a phrase, or a word. Syllables I can chain. Perhaps a few consonants. Even leftover punctuation. Diacritical marks? Superb on pasta.

It would be such a blessing.

I will intone your name when I pray.

Maybe a subtitle. Because I know you care.

This morning, a writer who survives on monthly prose disability payments from the government sent me a kicker. Just a kicker. You know what it was?

HUMOR

That just broke me. I was ugly crying for a good twelve seconds.

Writers. They’re all heart.

So yeah. I’m screwing up. My courage. Sorry, people have donated a lot of periods. I’m screwing up my courage and asking.

It’s going to be a lot of work stitching together all of these prose fragments. But hard work and I are old friends. Sure, some things in life scare me. But hard work? Ain’t one of ’em!

And it goes without saying — if you have a little extra time, and wouldn’t mind lifting a fellow writer, maybe you could volunteer half an hour and help out. Just light editing. Maybe throw a piece together. Three days tops.

And of course, I’ll need a lot of you writers to be readers. Ha! As if you wouldn’t drop and clap me 50!

Writers.

We’re freakin’ amazing.

Thanks to Gary Chapin for purging cliches. He would have shone at The Inquisition!