Dear Medium: Update This!
How Much Should We Give Away And For How Much?
Ten years ago I started writing a novella about a man who took a wrong flight and ended up on a tiny Island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The man was stuck there for 2 years as he didn’t purchase a return ticket home. He was homeless on the beach and found himself in many compromising positions. Many strange things happened in the story and the man eventually had to come to terms with all that had happened.
Sounds like a nice story, right? A nice made-up story about some castaway soul looking for redemption. But I can’t write fiction. I never could. The man in the story is me and even though I changed the names of the people I encountered, it all happened. Writing about it was therapy and helped me a lot.
It’s how I like to approach all my writing. I have to be the center. Not because I’m some superstar but because it’s all I really know. I only really know myself and how I see the world. This leaves me in a pickle as everything I write is painfully personal.
I have tried to write on other topics here on Medium and have shared things I would normally never utter. And for what? For it to be forgotten? Don’t get me wrong, if people don’t like my stuff, that’s fair, but give it a chance to linger in the system longer than a week. Is this not a platform for writers? For stories? For support of the fellow artist? Our fellow lost souls? Are we all destined to be forgotten in the update?
Updates are for games and dating sites. They are not for this realm of thoughtful introspection and soul-bearing. How dare you make me lick your boot for 5 dollars a month, you faceless ghoulish demon computer! What shill have you now picking and choosing my fate? If established men and women of this realm are feeling your perverted pinch what chance have I?
What chance do my pieces have? I have opened my soul for a penny. No, you fiendish tax man, I don’t want money, I want to have the chance of being remembered. I want a chance for one of my pieces on Anxiety to help some young man or woman. I want my poetry to have some semblance of probability of being read and giggled at by a purple-haired Scottish lass in a cafe somewhere in Tokyo.
Who are these people you push so high to the top? Am I jealous? No, just confounded that such banal writings can get so many paying subscribers hard and ready to clap. Where are the erotic fiction and crazy Space stories? Where are the short biographies of fucked up situations? Where is the flame? I can barely smell the embers anymore.
How much to share and for how much? The answer is to share everything for nothing. All I want is a chance to be heard. Keep the money you wretched application. Die like like Instagram in a sea of updates.
That’s my update.
Now go and stick it up your ass.