One Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-One Readers

What did I write that you liked enough to follow me?

Thank you!

That’s the first and most important thing I want to say to each person who has read my work and chosen to hit the little box marked “follow”.

Medium is a very different beastie from other social media and the fact that so many of you have paid your hard-earned money to subscribe to this platform and support writers speaks volumes. You are heroic.

It has to be said that I follow many of the writers who follow me. You are amazing creators and I feel lucky to get to read your work every day here. You push me to do better. Again, thank you.

One thousand two hundred and eighty-one people reading my work blows my mind. For decades I’ve been writing my little heart out, squinching my eyes shut and tossing my babies into the heartless void of Submittable. I don’t even go to that page anymore; it’s too discouraging to look at that nearly endless list of gray boxes that say “Declined”.

Once upon a time, literary reviews and magazines sent rejections slips. I used to hang them up until I had a wall so covered with the stupid things that I tore them all down and painted the wall. I kind of wish that I’d saved the ones from The New Yorker. Now they just ghost you. Worse, most literary magazines now charge a $3 submission fee. I get it; they can’t manage on the measly subscription fees they manage to attract and it’s the new business model. But something about paying $3 to get ghosted rubs me the wrong way.

Then a year ago December I got serious here on Medium

And then three months ago I lost my great paying job and went into high gear here with daily writing, publishing, and promotional work across social media.

To my utter and everlasting astonishment, I have readers!

You. You read what I write and that’s just about the most fantastic thing ever. Would I like to earn enough money to keep the wolves from the door doing this? Oh, hell, yes. But I don’t kid myself. There are millions of us tapping away at keyboards right this very minute and only a very few hit the sweet spots that readers are hungry to find.

I’ve had really weird stuff take off while other pieces sink quietly into the murk at the bottom of the internets. It’s mostly the fiction, I have to say, that doesn’t fly and I get that.

Fiction is a tricky business. I’ve been making stories up for many many years. I can’t count the short stories I’ve written (six of which have actually been published although none have earned me any money) and then there’s “Graceless”. I wrote and re-wrote and re-re-wrote Grace’s story starting in 2015. I’ve published the first chapter as a Medium series using my partner’s photography to set the scene.

Grace is currently sitting obediently on a flash drive waiting for me to 1) find an editor and 2) print her out again to read in full.

But people don’t trust fiction for a good reason. There’s a lot of bad fiction out there and life is short. While I like to think reading my stories is a great use of anyone’s limited amount of time, there’s kind of no way to gauge what people will like when it comes to fiction.

And writing fiction takes time. As in weeks to get a story just right. I’ve set myself a daily writing project for January just to keep my fiction muscles from completely atrophying. The idea grew from one that my partner thought of doing although his turned into a one-off:

I opted instead for the daily challenge of writing a fictional obituary. It is a lot trickier than I initially thought, but it does the job. It keeps me finding new, unusual, but still believable ways to talk about death (that topic never gets old, ya know?).

I had the idea for this piece in a dream and meant for it to be something of a love letter to you. You can’t believe how important it is to get up each day to write knowing there are eyes out there ready to take at least some of it in. It’s also a real gift to have your work to read.

So, tell me: what did I write that did it for you?

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