It has been another great week for me as an essayist!
I published a new piece on Medium about cutting cable – a much lighter read than my last few. I actually started this one nearly a year ago, but let it sit in my drafts until this week when the announcement of the cost of Disney's upcoming streaming service and the premiere of the final season of Game of Thrones prompted me to revisit the piece. It was a nice break from the heavily emotional pieces I've been working on this past month. It was syndicated on InspireMore, as well.
My essay about how my husband and I never say, "I love you, too," was syndicated on Filter Free Parents, this week. That piece has now reached over 2K views on Medium.
My recent essay about acknowledging the trauma of my son's birth got a good start on Medium and was then picked up by Scary Mommy. I've had women reaching out to me, letting me know they can relate to my experience, thanking me for sharing my story. It is an incredible experience, as a writer, to have someone reach out to thank you for writing.
This was my third piece on Scary Mommy. It is always a thrill to be up on such a well-known site with an audience of millions.
It used to be that I could count on an influx of Facebook page likes when I had a piece up on a big site like Scary Mommy or Love What Matters.
I've found though, lately, even when I am fortunate enough to have a piece up on a site with millions of followers, I am not seeing many new likes or follows on my social media pages.
I've been getting better at trying not to care about the numbers – to simply do my thing and let whatever happens, happen – but it is so hard not to notice. And it doesn't help that writers are constantly reminded they need a solid social media following and an extensive mailing list to be successful.
It feels like all of social media is in some sort of transitional state – everything is up in the air, floating around, there is no rhyme or reason, nothing to grab on to. I wonder how it will settle.
The decrease in social media interaction also makes it more difficult for me to gauge just how successful a piece is. I mostly rely on Muck Rack to show me how many social media reactions a piece has garnered; however, those numbers are steadily low despite page views being high for some pieces. Unfortunately, I only have access to page view stats on a few of the platforms I work with. So, this week, I created a new spreadsheet to better to visualize and estimate how well my pieces are performing.
I did receive a couple of essay rejections this week from both original and syndication queries. The cold pitch I mentioned a couple weeks ago went unanswered, so I am still querying that piece. And I received an acceptance to have an essay syndicated in the near future on another site I have not yet worked with, which I am excited for.
Beyond essays, I also submitted my latest flash fiction piece for consideration in another anthology. I submitted a poem for consideration in a poetry collection, as well.
And, after all that talk last week, I did add a couple hundred words to my family history memoir this week. I have all the chapters for that book outlined and started, I just need to fill in the story.
