Member-only story
Medium: a love story
First kiss
I first learned about Medium from Facebook, by reading Medium articles that had been posted there. After lurking here for a while, confining myself to reading and reading and reading plus the occasional response, I thought I would try my hand at writing something, providing a little of the user generated content that makes Medium what it is. Here I saw people writing intelligent long form articles and stories that they clearly worked hard on — editing, rewriting, and revising until they had just what they wanted. My question to myself was, what do I know?
A few kisses into it
At that time I was still working and I was a bicycle commuter so I wrote a 5-part series of articles about bicycling as basic transportation. That was November of 2015. I was disappointed at the paltry engagement they received but I said to myself, “be not discouraged,” and wrote 5 more stories in 2016, 8 in 2017, 27 in 2018, and 30 so far in 2019*. Not a large output compared to many writers on Medium but I was writing. More than I had ever. I was trying different genres. Notice the increase in output from year to year, and the increase in the increase. Although 27 to 30 is much less that 8 to 27, 2019 is hardly over yet! I was having fun. I didn’t have to do it, like when I was still going to school. I wasn’t trying to make some kind of living at it. I was — and still am…
