I'm posting this #WIPWednesday a week early so that I can do my year-in-review retrospective for the final Wednesday of 2021.
Since my last post, I wrote a new essay, "I Hope You Stick Around," and published it on Medium.
You'll find most of my essays these days are published on Medium. That is for a couple reasons. First, by self-publishing the original, I retain all rights to my work and can submit for syndication whenever and wherever I'd like. But, mainly, because very few outlets pay their writers anymore and I am not alright with giving my work away for free to let others profit from it. When I first started writing, I was paid $100 for one essay. That quickly became maybe $20 or $10 per essay. And that quickly became nothing but "exposure." All this while the outlets still earn money through advertising to which they are using their writers' essays to drive views. By publishing on Medium, I at least have the potential to be the one earning the money generated by my words. And I can get "exposure" by syndicating the pieces.
That is not to say I won't ever submit an original to an outlet. In fact, I just did. I had a draft sitting in my folder since summer 2019 and when I saw a call for submissions it'd be perfect for, I gave it an updated edit and sent it off. The outlet doesn't pay much for accepted essays, but at least they do still pay something. And I'd be happy to have a byline with them. I should find out in January if they accepted the piece to run in February.
I also posted a couple graphics on Instagram and remained active in my Instagram Stories almost daily.
And, the biggest news, a new newsletter hit inboxes on Monday and I have high hopes for getting back to it being a quarterly occurrence.