I’m only Asking Once
I remember perusing popular social media feeds and encountering stories whose root URL was medium.com. Intrigued and curious, I would click the hyperlink and travel to the article. I enjoyed what I read, but every month after I read three free stories, I was prompted to pay to access unlimited Medium articles. For $5 a month I maintain my membership with the community.
Membership granted access to content curated to my personal reading tastes. I followed crisp writers like Tim Denning, who blog about personal development and entrepreneurship, and clever writers like Jessica Wildfire, the self purported uninfluencer. Every once and a while The New York Times and The Atlantic import select articles for Medium members to access. Not all the content I consumed was stellar, however. My eyes, at times, fell victim to poor ideas, poor grammar, and all around poor writing. There are sound recommendation tools to filter out the content you don’t want to be exposed to. But the overwhelming catalogue of good writing was well worth the monthly membership fee.
Medium had become a place for me to read and, eventually, a place to write. The platform has a simple yet powerful space to draft, edit, and write stories. Though, for many months, I opted to remain a reader on Medium and to let the willing writers submit themselves to the Partner Program. I wrote off my past accomplishments as a columnist for the small town Rimbey Review newspaper (2015–16). I dismissed the work I put in as an author for the Gateway magazine (2016–2018). I forgotten my achievements in Wherever We Roam: A New Collection of Canadian Short Stories (2015) and in the Prairie Journal (Issue 68, 2017–18) among other print publications, like John Steckley’s Elements of Sociology: A Critical Canadian Intro., fifth ed. Then I acquiesced. I started writing on Medium and applied to their Partner Program — I wanted to get paid to write.
I’ve received honorariums for some of my published writing. But it took the will of Sisyphus to make a savage start as a writer using Facebook Notes. I used to get drunk at my kitchen table and write. Hungover, I’d edit (more like pretended to edit) my draft in Microsoft Word and ‘publish’ my written work by copying and pasting the draft into the FB Notes text field. There were constant formatting oddities, spacing irregularities, and erroneous typesetting to remedy. It was a crude process to get my notes out for my FB friends to read, like, and comment on.
New audiences and persistence led to my pro bono work as a columnist for the Rimbey Review. I wrote a weekly column for eighteen months. Every week a photo of my face and my written opinion would circulate to five thousand readers via a print publication. In a few cases I had members of the regal Rimbey public approach me in the local grocery store or post office to comment on my newspaper column. However, I left Rimbey and its newspaper when I transferred to finish my university degree. It didn’t seem appropriate to write for a newspaper for I town I no longer resided in.
The Gateway magazine at the University of Alberta was collaborative yet challenging environment for a volunteer writer like me to maintain the momentum to write. But I powered through the office politics to learn new skills indirectly related to writing and publishing. The editorial team gifted me an advice column though it felt like a reoccurring homework assignment. Ultimately the Gateway wasn’t a home for my writing, it was like a leased apartment for my words while I finished my degree
Throughout my time writing for the Rimbey Review and the Gateway, I dabbled with a personal website, jonahkondro.ca — rest in peace. My website wasn’t successful and that’s okay. It was an experiment meddling with WordPress, search engine optimization, and internet tools to craft a site worth hyperlinking to. I did publish some unique writing on my website, but it seemed like I was burning up my time constructing a motorcycle frame when what I really wanted to do was to let out the clutch and ride. The ashes of jonahkondro.ca were released into the wind.
I kept traditional publishing opportunities in my peripheries. The Prairie Journal gave me a small honorarium when they published “I Move My Existence into City”. Oxford Publishing gave me a small honorarium when “My Silent Ukrainian Identity” was included in Elements of Sociology. I couldn’t quite crack the winner’s circle when I submitted “Winter’s Signature” to a writing contest, which printed the winners and worthy entries (including mine) in Wherever We Roam. Sisyphus didn’t get paid to push the boulder up the mountain — at least I could afford a couple apéritifs along my way.
Conventional employment still pays the bills; however, I want supplement my income with the money generated from the views my writing receives. I’ve been giving my writing away for free for too long. The Medium Partner Program is a means to get paid to write.
Not everything I write and publish on Medium will be metered by the Partner Program. Any of my writing that has appeared elsewhere in the past that I chose to import and share through Medium won’t make a cent — and that’s my choice. Only new writing will be metered. My intent is to use Medium as a place to share old and new writing to garner a unique audience in the hopes of earning a humble supplemental income.
For 2022 I have set for myself an ambitious goal of publishing at minimum twelve new articles on Medium, one for every month. And throughout the year I plan on importing at least six old notes from my drunken days posting notes on Facebook.
These are some of the working titles of the rough drafts I’m working on for release throughout 2022: “I don’t care that there’s a Pandemic”; “The Weird Bath”; “How to Make Homemade Pizza Sauce”; “Contractual Debt Negates Investment Returns”; “Is Talk-to-Text Real Writing?”; and “A Symbiotic Relationship with a Typewriter”. I hope that teasing these working titles cajole you to pay for a Membership.
Medium is a place for writers to share stories for the readers. Your active participation will keep me accountable as a productive writer in 2022 and this momentum will arc into larger, traditional works of fiction. That is my word.
