Writer Focus

Oops, and Mea Culpa

Sometimes the best plans get derailed

For the month of June, I have been doing a series of features that highlight the great writing of authors that are new to the Illumination publication.

So far things have gone pretty well. For most of the month I have been writing up the feature the day before I publish. I pull the writers I am going to feature from Dr Mehmet Yildiz‘s daily article that lists all the new writers for the day. I have it timed to be two days behind, so it is possible for me to have two days prepped and ready to go.

This week my wife and I got the opportunity to travel to see her daughter and husband in Austin. So, in anticipation of not having much time in front of the computer I prepped two articles for Thursday June 18 and Friday June 19th.

Those scheduled articles worked perfectly. I set them up to publish in the future and added them to Illumination and forgot about them. Easy peasy.

On Thursday I had a little time to write, so I put together Saturday’s feature which is this one:

I did all the same things I did with the articles to make them auto-publish. I set the schedule for Saturday morning, added it to the Illumination publication. I double checked to make sure the article was still in my personal draft queue (right beside the article ready for Friday morning), and I also double checked in Illumination’s queue to make sure that it hadn’t appeared there early.

I didn’t see the Friday article or the Saturday article in the Illumination queue when I checked on Thursday morning, so I logged off and went about visiting with family and enjoying Austin.

So, I was a little surprised when I got up on Friday morning and saw that the Saturday feature was already published. At first, I thought perhaps I had screwed up and set it to auto-publish on the wrong date (even though I obsessively double check that sort of thing and doubted that I had).

Then I saw an email that said another editor had published my article. That’s when I knew that there must have been a glitch on Medium. So, I logged on to the Illumination Slack channel and found out that I wasn’t the only person experiencing untimely publications of draft articles.

I guess there isn’t much to do except apologize to the writers in the features and explain that things didn’t go as I’d planned, in spite of best intentions and reasonable attempts to make things work correctly.

So, to the following writers, I apologize for not getting things put out in an orderly and straightforward fashion:

V Vinay Reddy, Gaurav Jha, Terence Teoh, Courtney Mooney, Ankit Agrawal, Andrei Druta, Semi Koen, Martina Doleckova, Arghyamalya Biswas, Toon Vos, Liam Hunter-Bailey, Anna L. Shtorm, Salma Enan, Sohani Sirdeshmukh, C. J. Kim, Doyin Oyelami, Su Terry, Warren Greaves, Mitva Patel ⭐, MAED, The Soul Doctor, Bob James,Dénika Soria Jiménez, Tanush Prem, Manolo Romero, Anna Winterbell, Gavin Sher, Julius Naras, Sophia Paige, Tina L. Smith, helenaknows, Alaina Balkaran, Khadejah Jones, Eleonora Hristova, Sparkle, Rancell Tapia, Nate Muller, Lena Ovechkin, Edris Quinn C., Mihai Sandu, Casi Mclean, Terence Walter,

Hopefully things will work according to plan for the rest of the month!

I am hoping that Friday’s feature is getting as much love as possible in spite of appearing to be out of order in the sequence. If you haven’t seen it yet, please give it a read and delve into the authors’ great work here:

If anyone reaches out about having me feature their articles, and I haven’t already, I will plan on doing a bonus feature to catch everyone up on Monday when I get back home.

For the record, I have put together Sunday’s feature already and it sits in my personal draft queue, but I haven’t added it to Illumination as yet. I am still planning on trying to use the auto-publish feature, but I will wait to add it to the publication until Saturday sometime.

As a bit of an experiment, I plan to auto-schedule this story for Saturday morning so people can follow the links to both Friday and Saturday’s features if they didn’t get the chance already.

I will set this up, add to Illumination and see what happens.

Thanks to all that are reading along with my features and checking out all the great stories from our new writers. I hope you have enjoyed all the diverse writing and topics as much as I have!

If you liked this article, you may also like:

Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.