I Keep Forgetting!

When I get a piece curated it’s a total news flash to me

I’m an incorrigible checker of stats, reads, and claps here. Forget daily or even hourly. While I’m reading your stuff and clapping, I’m constantly keeping an eye on my stats. It’s a sickness.

But curation?

Forget about it. I used to dutifully keep an eye on whether the fine and discerning editors on Medium had read each of my pieces. When something got curated, I was all jumping up and down, startling the cat. When another piece “had not been distributed in topics”, I’d defiantly shrug.

Who cares? (me)

Then we hit this stretch where essays, short stories, show-and-tell, poems, and outright lies sat there and sat there with none of the craved attention from the editors. Weeks would pass and no action.

I wasn’t the only one wondering what the hell was going on. I decided to take action myself.

You won’t be surprised that Ev Williams himself didn’t immediately reach out to take me up on my offer. I kind of wasn’t either. Kind of.

So with wait times stretching out to well over a week before anything showed up in the old curation column, I just quit looking. Oh, who cares anyway? (we’ve already established that, Sunshine)

Then I wrote this little item and thought, hey, this is a natural for The Ascent.

Now, generally, I don’t much bother with The Big Pubs anymore. They take too long to get back to me so I tend to publish where I’m an editor so I don’t have to wait. Plus there’s always Candour where the lovely and talented Nicole Bedford often has submitted work published in record time. I love Candour, btw.

But this one was real Ascent material, I thought. I was wrong. After the usual two day-wait, my piece was rejected because they just have so many really high-quality submissions all the time. Good luck. There’s the door.

Fine. Be that way.

I published the piece in The Partnered Pen and two hours later I was alerted that “ Our curators just read your story, It’s Absolutely OK to Not Have a Career, that you submitted for review. Based on its quality, they selected it to be recommended to readers interested in Work across our homepage, app, topic page, and emails.”

HA!

But now I’m completely off track with watching for curation. I kind of enjoy having it come as a bolt from the blue when I’m not expecting it and, to be honest, I’m never expecting it.

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