Getting curated on Medium has led me down an unintended path
I have mentioned before that I have started to write on Medium and a couple of articles in, I got one curated. My plan was to be one of those annoying bastards that write an article a day, is hugely successful and gets xxx number of followers and cash in their first couple of months and then just switches to articles about how successful they are on Medium, how many articles they write per hour and how to achieve this. Ok, I am taking the piss with the second bit but it does sound pretty awesome and I am not going to rule it out. Especially given that I seem to have gone down an unexpected path after getting curated.
What happened was I wrote an introductory thing just to see how it all worked, the interface and so forth. I specifically mentioned that I wasn’t going to write about writing as it seemed like the site was full of such pieces. I then wrote an article about Artificial Intelligence and how they will take our jobs and a couple of reworked pieces from my book on Thai ghosts, spirits, and demons. I have been writing a book and the ideas behind ‘plotting versus pantsing’ were something that had been lurking in the back of my mind. So, on a whim, I wrote an article about it and it got curated by the Startup and I received a ton of views. I thought it was pretty cool so I applied to write for a writing publication and got accepted. Without meaning to, I had been seduced by the writing about writing thing, and there I suddenly found myself writing pieces on word counts of famous authors and why you should be writing short stories.
I was riding high, giddy with the knowledge that I had been selected, curated and published and I had pretty much only just joined the site. Thanks to hubris, my follow up articles were rejected by a couple of publications on the completely predictable basis that they had a ton of articles like this. Humbled, I have since decided that I will return to my niches of technology, psychology and digital marketing and so on. I am struggling to remember why I am writing this blog post but thought it might help someone like me who is used to having an editor and a clear market in mind who dabbles in something new. The problem with sites like Medium is there is so much freedom, you find yourself following whatever takes your fancy and that could be the opposite of what you intended. It’s like doing research on Wikipedia about the Hubble telescope and then four hours later you are learning about Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar (really interesting, look her up). I need to be more disciplined.
On a side note, I hope you are all well and healthy and virus-free. I will stop writing about Medium for a bit and will continue to study, read, watch TV and play games. All for fascinating review purposes obviously.
