IMPOSSIBLE TO CATEGORIZE
An Open, Appreciative Letter to the Medium Community From a Semi-Newbie
This is gonna get a little sappy. Deal with it, you wonderful jerks
I can barely even remember what my creative writing life was like six weeks ago. It had been almost a decade since I had made any consistent, focused effort to write and grow creatively. Then I came up with an idea for a political satire piece about Trump and Putin and did a Google search for humor sites that accepted submissions. I started reading every single one that was still actively publishing and ended up here.
Crap. Just realized this isn’t gonna qualify for humor without a joke. Here goes:
How can you spot a blind man at a nude beach?
It isn’t hard.
Housekeeping complete. Back to work.
I quickly recognized that my original Trump-Putin satire piece was becoming a 3000 word monster that wasn’t fit for 99.9% of humor sites. So I started writing shorter pieces like a freaking maniac and began submitting.
The one and only Christine Stevens was the first to take pity on me and publish this thing in The Haven. Little did she know, she turned the low flame of the Bunsen burner under my rediscovered writing confidence into a higher flame suitable for wok cooking.
Since then, I’ve experienced nothing but the most kind and supportive feedback from this community. I’m still a mere tadpole here, with only 17 published stories and 18 followers. But I’m gaining powerful tools by reading all of your work, and my flame is starting to resemble a torch.
Inspiration blooms here like (blank) in the (blank). Okay, I clearly still need your help. The best I came up with was “Pollen in the Wind,” but that sounds like a Weird Al parody of a Kansas song about allergies.
Ugh. This post is already ignoring almost every Medium pub editor’s best advice on what not to do when writing an article for submission.
Screw it. This is a love letter.
Last week, I submitted my ginormous Trump-Putin political satire piece to The New Yorker. I’m looking forward to their polite rejection email in about 6 months, but the point is that I went for it. We all go for it here every day, and that’s a beautiful thing in my book.
For my whopping 18 followers, I promise to get back to my pseudo-intellectual fart jokes by tomorrow.
Today is about giving thanks four months before it becomes mandatory for a day.
Thanks to everyone out there in Medium Land. 🙏
