It's not that easy, being a writer.
Sometimes, you just want to face-plant your goddamn laptop.
I've had a frustrating couple of weeks, writer-ness-wise.
- A piece of poetry I'd submitted to a magazine got rejected (again.)
- I got declined for rejoining the Google AdSense programme (again.)
- And I made only pennies on Medium (...again.)
While I know that rejection is part of being a writer and blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda... it still sucks.
Not least because things are ridiculously tough out there for creatives at the moment - how are we supposed to compete with AI in terms of volume and attention, while also proving that we're not AI?
That is, in the most ironic way, not humanly possible.
So, I plan on singing my sorrows, metaphorically, and giving you all a mild (and mildly justified,) rant to read 😅
The Poetry
I've written a lot of poetry in my life, and lord knows I'm my own harshest critic.
But I wrote a poem that I think might actually be, y'know, good.
(And potentially summon an ancient power, but we all have our quirks 😅)
Like... I think this is good enough to warrant an audience - maybe even an actual payment.
(Why is it so astonishing an idea to actually pay a writer? Like... we can't survive on dreams and pixie dust, y'know?)
So every time it comes back rejected, it tears at my heart a little.
It's not even been rejected that many times really - we're still in single figures - but with each submission taking several months to get back to me... it feels like many, many more. It's a long process.
And then you have to go through the whole rigamarole of finding another publication to send it to.
Which sounds easy (and is made much easier by Erica Verrillo's blog and/or Medium account - a must-know for writers, imho,) but in reality involves meandering around a variety of submission-based hoops and hoping that your poem fits in one of them.
...Not-so-fun fact - most magazines etc. with open poetry submissions will only take short poems, which mine is not.
Also, because I have a whole paganistic mystical-fantastical thing going on, I have to check whether they accept spec-fic poetry and/or non-realistic poetry.
And some places which accept sci-fi poetry only accept hard sci-fi (i.e. spaceships, aliens, lasers, etc.,) which mine is not... the list goes on, tbh.
And I think we need to recognise how heart-breaking it is as a writer for this thing you've put your heart and soul into to be bounced back with a 'nope.'
While I'm not giving up (...I've already submitted it somewhere else, not gonna lie,) I really think we need to be open about how effing hard it is - and not just tell people to 'suck it up' or 'grow a thicker skin.'
It can hurt and not be the end of the story. #JustSaying.
Google AdSense
*deep sigh*
You'd think I would have learned my lesson by now, having previously been on AdSense, and given it up because of bureaucratic Capitalist nonsense.
But Dora Reads has been getting more views lately (ironically, mostly from Google,) and Medium isn't paying much any more (...we'll get to that later,) so I figured I'd make a few pennies with ads.
First off, apparently now you can only have one account per address and my brother had registered one to our home address many years ago and then promptly forgotten all about it - because that's just him, tbh.
So I had to get him to recover that account in order to close it properly, which took much longer to register on Google's systems than it should have.
I figured that after that was sorted, it would be easy.
...Because the last time I applied for AdSense was a long time ago, and my memory is swiss cheese, so I had totally forgotten that it was a pain in the ar*e and involves being decline a bunch of times for no clear reason.
They've now declined me an additional two times, and the only explanation I got was that I need to make some 'quick fixes.'
Said fixes would be a damn sight quicker if I knew what they actually want me to do.
As it is, I'm left scrying the internet to find breadcrumb hints on old reddit threads and Quora questions.
At the moment, I think what will probably help is if I give this blog something of a spring clean.
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but I spend half my life formatting. Unfortunately, entropy creeps into every system, and on a blog that's been running for more than 11 years, there are some corners that've gotten more than a little dusty.
And despite the fact that Blogger still seems, for my sins, to offer the best balance of creative freedom and functional practicality, it also has a tendency of inventing html just because it's bored.
It's one of the fundamental rules of life; sock goblins take socks, blog gremlins add code.
So regardless of how neat and tidy I left it, when I go back to them, blog posts from 2017 will somehow have like 3 broken links, 2 weird font changes, and an image that is inexplicably aligned to the right-hand side of the page.
So, yeah - if you see things getting spruced up around here more often than usual (because 'usual' involves a great deal of chaos and not a lot of organised,) then it's because I'm still trying to get onto AdSense.
Medium
For those who don't know, Medium is a writing/blogging platform which actually pays its writers...
...unfortunately its business model is subscription-based, which leads to limited income.
Even my dyscalculic butt knows that that model is not right for a system in which your writer's earnings are based on read time.
Especially when the Freemium model (i.e. host ads or pay to go ad-free,) would work so much better for this site.
(And yes, I have suggested this model to the CEO's digital face. I don't think he likes me very much, I keep trying to start Socialist worker's revolutions in his comments section.)
The result is that they somehow ended up in financial difficulties (gosh darn what a shock) and while they have managed to get themselves out of it, they did so mostly by slashing writers' earnings.
...And then they gaslit everyone by saying that they hadn't. Which really, dudes, not cool.
Because whereas before the earning rate fluctuated over the years between $0.04/read and about $0.10/read, now it's less than $0.02/read.
Oh, and the distribution system - the social feed that shows your work to other readers so that you can, y'know, get read - has pretty much collapsed (allegedly - again this is something they deny.)
So we have less reads for less money. (Allegedly.)
Honestly, I could go on and on about the issues with Medium, but the fact remains: I'm sticking with it. For now.
Because there's no real competition for writers' opportunities and platforms at the moment - the companies are completely at a loss to stop the flood of AI content (or worse, they don't want to.)
There is SubStack, which a lot of people use, but it also has its issues. Still, I won't say never - a girl has to adapt when and where she can, and there may come a time when I take the plunge (like so many Medium writers have already done.)
So yeah, all of that combined has definitely culminated in the writerly urge to face-plant the laptop more than once over the last few weeks.
Support human artists, creators, writers, bloggers...
Support human talent, dearest nerdlets. Because right now we need it.
The next Nerd Church will be on Sunday 7th February - hope to see you there!
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