Achievement Unlocked!

I know I’ve been silent for far too long. And I’ve been asking some of you to join this email newsletter so you can learn more about me and my immediate plans for the future.

Given that i’ve had more downs that up lately, it feels like cheating to return with the good news first, especially when that good news is one of the more recent events.

But the fact of the matter is I do have a milestone to celebrate: Yesterday, I was published in a Medium publication that I don’t own or control for the first time.

The title of that article is Curiosities of Meaning or How Language Evolves.

For those of you who don’t know, Medium is a blogging platform. You can have your own blog that is under just your name. But you can create what Medium calls publications…these are verticals that, if managed correctly, should have a single topic. The topic can be as broad as “Sports”–like the section of a newspaper–or it could be narrow and extremely niche like say, people in Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963.

While you can create your own publications (and I have: Professor Tom’s Better Ever Day, Mutliplayer Emacs, Encyclopædia Reading and ProfessorTom’s Film Reviews and Sundry), you have to submit your posts to other people’s publications. They can edit your posts, ask for edits to be made or reject your post outright. Of course, they can always decide to publish your post as-is.

I saw that Word Garden was a new publication and it was looking for writers. I had the post in mind when I saw Word Garden’s “advertisement” in my feed on Medium, so I wrote the article and applied. Within a few hours, I was published.

Not what I expected

I thought I would see a lot more traffic than I could generated by myself by being published in someone else’ publication. That turns out not to have been true in this case, although timing and the size of the publication may have something to with that: I was published on a Sunday afternoon and the publication had just under 1,000 followers when I checked yesterday. However, the publication could wind up in a percentage of that 1,000 people’s feeds over the course of the day, so there may be some long-tail effects.

I think it’s too early to tell.

And, also, we have to keep in mind that I don’t have that many Medium followers to begin with, so really, the Venn diagram of my followers, Word Garden’s followers and Word Garden’s publisher, Carl Jeffers’s followers may be relatively small. However, Carl is an up and coming writer and has already had more success on Medium in ~2 months than I’ve had since I joined in 2015. I think Carl will do well and I’ll still be trying to figure Medium out.

Call to Action

Please do go and check out Curiosities of Meaning or How Language Evolves in Word Garden.

This newsletter is reader supported. Upgrade to a paid plan to show your support today.