More Parenting Humor From Gail

Photo by Helena Jakovicova Kovacova on Pexels

I had a new humor piece accepted for publication last week and published today at Frazzled. Job Specifications for Position As Our Child was inspired by two generations of children in our family.

We've found this morning that some family members who I've sent the link to were only able to read a portion of it before getting a message that only Medium (the platform on which Frazzled exists) members can read the rest of it. Usually readers get a few free reads on Medium each month, so I don't know what that's about. 

Since Medium allows me to share articles on Facebook and Twitter, I assume you can read the whole thing if you access it from my posts there. So if you're either a Facebook or Twitter person, you're welcome to look for me there, and welcome to friend or follow. 

UPDATE: Well, maybe you won't be able to read it by way of Facebook and Twitter. If that's the case, my apologies.

UPDATE2: By Twitter I do mean the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

UPDATE3: I have come up with a link that should make this story available. Living on Medium requires a lot of effort.

Two New Humor Publications In Two Days!

Jesswin Thomas on Unsplash

 After There's Not Going To Be A St. John The Baptist Day Parade This Year, Eli was published at The Haven on May 31, You Are The Parents Of Sixth Graders. Act Like It. was published at Frazzled on June 2. It was inspired by a daycation I was on the week before, during which we were in a museum gift shop with a field trip group. That triggered memories of my own days as a field trip chaperone.

You Are The Parents Of Sixth Graders is interesting, as writing goes, because it started out as a short story I wrote maybe twenty-five years ago when I was invited to submit a humor story to an anthology that was being put together by an editor at my publishing house. The story was about a couple of boys riding herd on some adult chaperones they found to be unruly. The story was rejected, but one thing led to another last weekend, and I revised the material for a totally different type of piece.

Something similar happened in April when I revised a piece of creative nonfiction and turned it into Your Guide To Finding The Perfect Church.

I am now wondering about what else is in my file cabinet.

A New Humor Piece Published Today: And A Case Study In How Experience Works In Writing

By Monica Sedra on Unsplash

Frazzled, a very good humor site that focuses on parenting on the Medium platform, published my most recent humor piece, Your Child Has Been Exposed To COVID...Again. The pandemic is a never ending source of fun.

Your Child Has Been Exposed To COVID is an example of using life experience in writing. 

My History In Using Life Experience

I hate to use the phrase "write what you know," because, while it is well-known, a lot of people don't know what it means. It's often interpreted as confining writers to writing only about what's happened to them or what they have done. In reality, it's much more about taking a dip into the life pool for details for characters, settings, plots, and every aspect of story telling. It gives writing depth, richness, and authority. Oh, and relatability.  Additionally, it's a whole lot easier than having to come up with details from scratch.

A lot of my children's books drew very much upon my life as a mother and on my children's lives. 

My Life Among the Aliens and Club Earth were collections of short stories that came out of what was going on when I was raising two preschool and early grade school boys. Yes! I was that mother who baked with bran! 

A Year With Butch and Spike followed some sixth-graders through a school year. By that point in my kids' lives, I was somewhat jaded about the school experience. Their school experience, which, by extension, was my experience as a parent of school-age children.

Then we got to middle school, where, it turns out, not every student is a Happy Kid! Neither are their moms.

Saving the Planet & Stuff was written for one of my sons when he was in the early high school years. He liked reading humor, but found that a lot of YA humor at that time involved girls. He was fine with reading it, but, you know, where were the guys? This booked combined him with what I thought I was going to be during my college years. Two generations were dealing with identity from different sides of the subject--Who am I going to be? Who have I been? 

One of my sons once asked me of my writing, "Do you ever have an original thought?" My response was, "I don't have to, so long as I have you."

Which Brings Us To Your Child Has Been Exposed To COVID...Again 

My interest here was treating the confusion I felt about what I should be doing about COVID, when "what I should be doing" seemed to always be changing. I'm not that quick on my feet. I came up with the preschool situation because we've had that come up a few times with the preschoolers in our family--once just before Christmas, which included me because I spent a couple of hours with the child involved the day his parents found out about the exposure. 

I finished a draft and, I kid you not, that day we hear that the number of days people need to quarantine after exposure has changed. By that point, I was so confused that I couldn't work out what was going on, let alone be funny about it.

Several weeks later, Son Number 2 tells me about something very interesting related to a COVID exposure at his son's preschool. "I can use that!" I told him. Soon afterwards, Son Number 1 texts us with some news about his daughter's preschool and COVID exposure. I can use that, too! I thought.

And that's why I was able to finish this humor piece.

Well, it was then that I came up with the UPDATE and strikeout repetitions. My children didn't write the entire thing.

But their experience, and my experience of hearing about their experience, kick started the completion of this piece.

I can't say enough about writing from experience.

My Medium Year

Last year I got serious about humor, and I finally started experimenting with publishing at Medium. 

By humor I mean short, funny pieces that function as...humor. I'm not talking humorous short stories or humorous essays or humorous children's books. Or screenplays or plays or any other kind of humor. I'd been thinking about dipping into humor for a while. I was undeterred by the pandemic, which many people do not find funny at all, because I am very goal-oriented. While writing humor wasn't an actual goal or objective for 2020, short-form writing was. In fact, one of my humor pieces from last year came out of a flash fiction workshop I took last summer.

One of the issues with humor writing is where to publish it. Not every publication wants that sort of thing. In looking for places to publish, Medium, which I'd heard of before, kept coming up. 

Unfortunately, in the past I'd had trouble understanding what Medium is. So I combined my humor/short-form writing interest with experimenting with Medium.

What Is Medium?

When I first started hearing about Medium, I thought it was a publication, an on-line magazine. I understand publications/magazines/journals. I kept trying to think of it that way and wondered how writers would submit work to it.

However, Medium isn't one publication. Medium is a publishing platform where anyone can publish in a number of different ways. A medium is a method of dispersing information, which might explain the name. I find it helpful to think of Medium as a publishing world, the way there is a traditional New York City publishing world and an academic publishing world. Like publications, I understand those things. Medium's publishing world is just on-line. I may be totally wrong in that thinking, but I find it helpful, nonetheless.

The Most Basic Way Of Publishing On Medium

The simplest way to publish on Medium is to just write something and publish it there. That's how I began my Medium experiment.

• I had to create an account, which was free.
• 
  You publish by placing your piece of writing into Medium's format/template. This took a little effort on my part, but many things in life are difficult until you know how to do them. 
• I needed an illustration. Medium provides suggestions for places to go for free photos, but in this case, I took my own. I found fitting the photo in correctly difficult, but, as you all know, I have an in-house computer guy. He worked it out for me.
• On May 25, 2020, I published Well, How Many Masks Have You Made? directly on the Medium platform. 

I would describe this level of publishing on Medium as the equivalent of self-publishing, and it has the same drawback that self-publishing is famous for--it's difficult to get attention for your work. There are supposed to be over a million new articles posted on Medium every month. That's a lot of competition. Publishing on Medium like this may mean that the only people who will know about this article are those I reached with Twitter and Facebook notifications or through this blog. 

Another Level of Publishing On Medium

Remember how I originally thought Medium was, itself, a publication? Instead it is a publishing world (platform) that contains many publications that individuals have started and maintained. In 2019 there were supposed to be over 8,000 of them. Some traditional publications have created an on-line presence on Medium. But so have individuals. I could have created a publication on Medium for my humor writing. Instead, I decided to submit to humor publications already existing on Medium. There are quite a few of them. 

• 
  My impression of the publications on Medium is that some are quite selective in what they accept and some may be less so. Some are very focused on one theme. Some seem to be interested in specific styles. As with any other kind of submission, you need to spend time reading publications before you spend time submitting. And there are a great many on Medium.
  
• With most Medium publications I've dealt with, you submit by placing your writing in the Medium format/template (see above) and saving it as a draft. You send a link to the draft with your e-mail submission to the publication editors.
• If your work is accepted, the editors will notify you and add you as a writer for their publication. You'll find that notification in a drop box on your draft page, and you can then publish directly to that publication. 
• At the end of last year, a Medium humor publication accepted one of my pieces, and on Dec. 2, 2020, I published Dear Pastor Bill at The Haven. (Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels)

The benefit of publishing on a Medium publication is getting attention for your work. The publications already have a following, so your writing will be seen by more than just your own friends and followers. Additionally the publication will do some promotion at places like Twitter. And you now have another publication credit. For the immediate future, I don't plan to publish directly to Medium myself again but to submit to Medium publications.

The Payment Level

Yes, you can earn some money publishing on Medium. I shouldn't describe this as another level of publication there. I could have joined its payment system right away. However, as I said earlier, I found the Medium publishing world a bit complex, so I began by doing just one thing at a time. There's no reason anyone has to do that. You can sign up for the Medium Partner program immediately.

How you make money on Medium:

• Anyone can read a limited number of Medium articles each month.
• For $5 a month, you can become a member and have unlimited access to articles. By the way, if you're interested in publishing on Medium in some way, I'd suggest becoming a member so you can spend plenty of time checking out publications and see what other writers are dong there.
  
• When  fee-paying members read your story, a tiny portion of their monthly fee goes to you, the writer. Payment is based on readership. You don't get a flat fee.
  
• You need to join the Medium Partner program to generate these payments. If you just publish there, as I did with my first two humor pieces, you get no payment. You still gain the opportunity to put your writing out in front of people and try to generate an audience, but no money. 
• 
  It took me an hour or two to sign up for the Medium partner program, because I am slow. As part of joining, I also had to join Stripe, a company for processing payment on the Internet. It appears to be a middle man between Medium and its writer/partners. 
• You will also need to give Stripe access to a bank account that it can deposit your payments into. This could be a source of anxiety for some people. It certainly would have been for me, except I happen to already have a dedicated account for receiving writing-related payments. Hurray! 
• I was a member of Medium's partner program by the time I submitted my third humor piece to a publication. On Feb. 2, 2021, I published  My Child Doesn't Watch You Tube And Yours Shouldn't, Either at Frazzled. (Another one of my photos. Yeah, that's my living room.)
• I also placed my two earlier pieces in the partner program.
  

Okay, admit it. You want to know how much money I've made, don't you? I believe it was $2.61! I don't know if that was all earned by the most recent published piece or from all of them. 

Is The Experiment Over?

 

No. Though I have read that there are writers making money on Medium, certainly more than $2.61, my interest in publishing there is to find and build an audience for my humor--and perhaps other kinds of adult--writing. I attended a virtual book launch recently for Fast Funny Women, edited by Gina Barreca. Barreca said, "Finding your audience means being promiscuous with your work." (I'm going to be repeating that quote regularly this year.) I'm going to try to do that on Medium.

 

So the next phase of my Medium experiment will involve finding and broadening my audience and then trying to move out beyond Medium with my work.

 

Initially, I will be:

• Writing more humor that I can then submit
• Researching humor sites and humor writers on Medium and following them in order to keep up on what's happening at the sites and with what the humor writers are doing with their work.
• Researching other Medium publications where I might submit other kinds of short-form writing.

Stay tuned.