The Story Behind the Story Times 3

After what seemed to me like quite a bit of rejection the past couple of months, including two last Friday, I had three pieces published in three different Medium publications this past week. 

Kitchen Culture?

The story behind The Big Advantages of Small-Batch Baking was published in Tastyble on the fifth. This is one of my essays about eating/cooking. I have to come up with a name for this category, because as I've probably said before, I'm not interested in traditional food writing. Food writers need to know something. I'm interested in what I think of as nonprestige food. And I'm interested in life around eating. I just thought of "kitchen culture," right this minute. Perhaps I'll use those words somehow. 

Anyway, the backstory to this story is pretty much there in the story. The only interesting bit is that the weekend before it was accepted, I found myself with some extra time, because we were expecting snow the day I was supposed to visit with some relatives and help with the little people there. I spent this time making three small-batch recipes while my husband made one, so I could take pictures for this submission. One of my recipes didn't get into the pictures, because it was not photo ready when it came out of the oven. But that's how the photos in the article came about.

Interesting point: Tastyble has editors who do edit. Many publications on Medium don't. Editors can be helpful. The Tastyble editor I worked with made an excellent point about my original title. It was arty, but told nothing.

The snow didn't develop, I could have gone to my family's house instead of baking and taking pictures for work, but probably wouldn't have because it ended up that two people therre were sick. I worked instead of doing the mother thing. 

Bookish Stuff

I have published a few book-related things in various places on Medium. Last week I revised last Tuesday's blog post about using heritage months as temporal landmarks for planning reading. I'm interested in reworking blog material for publication elsewhere, though Medium would allow me to publish my blog posts there just as they are. 

Nonetheless, I did a big revision and expansion and published This Year I Am Using Heritage Months to Plan My Reading in Books Are Our Superpower. The piece was accepted for Medium's boosted program, which means it will get more promotion.

Reworking material for publication in different venues is a traditional free-lance writer thing, and I'm interested in doing more of it. 

I worked on this intently last Friday and Saturday when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to that same family member's house and then going there. However, they had more sickness there and cancelled. I worked on that photo I used for the illustration in addition to revising and revising and revising instead of bursting into that sick house and making everyone well, which, of course, I could have done with my magic. Working mother guilt lasts for generations.

A Writer on Writing

Erdal Erdal on Pexels

Yesterday The Writing Cooperative, a very big Medium publication that had rejected something I submitted there a few years ago (I can't remember what it was about) published my piece A Hermit Crab
Walks into a Bar. This was something I wrote at least a year and a half ago, so we're talking about submitting something from the files.

I didn't abandon any sick children or refuse to go out into a storm to work on this one, so that's good.

It's gratifying to have had so much published in such a short period. However, Medium has been experiencing a crisis related to payments going down for those writers accustomed to making regular money there and readership going down for writers like me who think they're doing well if they make a few dollars per story. We will have to see whether this recent work (and child abandonment) broadens my readership, which is my major reason for publishing on this platform.

More to follow?