Out of the Ashes
I posted one final story on Cowbird this morning. Today, apparently, the curtain will fall on that great storytelling place. Meanwhile, over here, on Medium, we’re just getting started. But I would say, we are off to a fine start, both here, and on MeWe, where we meet to interact, socially.
A couple weeks ago, I was feeling most disenfranchised. Especially after our last ditch, late in the 11th hour Hail Mary pass to try to save Cowbird from the scrap heap fell incomplete, and Jonathan still said no, I was feeling somewhat deflated.
The idea of having to try to rebuild it from scratch just left me feeling empty. I’m not good at that sort of thing. Some people do it well. I’m better at the building of bridges between folks within a community that already has a solid structure in place. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I showed up at Cowbird when I did. If I had arrived when they were just getting started, I might not have even stayed. It might have been too chaotic for me, then. Once I got there, they already had a regular rhythm of daily storytelling going full bore, and I just got swept up in it. It was easy to do.
Fortunately, Fellow Traveler and Jean Claude got a jump on things over here, building some structure and figuring things out to make it easier for the rest of us to come right over, and jump right in. I’d been here before, when several Cowbirders who were not totally happy with the direction of Cowbird at the time, came over here to try their hand at storytelling with Medium’s tools, got me to try it. I liked the storytelling tools, but it wasn’t Cowbird. It was different. I didn’t feel the community aspect here that I felt at Cowbird.
Now, thanks to these guys and everyone else who’s come over and jumped in, that aspect is part of this, now. Medium, with MeWe for the social part, and Story Hall as the gathering place for our stories here, has become a much more welcoming home.
It may become our permanent storytelling home, or perhaps it will be our temporary home, while Andy Rz and Hop Shore, and some others, do the heavy-lifting of building a brand new structure, one that borrows from the best of Cowbird, but adds new dimensions, like instantaneous language translation, to make it more welcoming to our friends who speak a different tongue than English. We will all be able to read stories in whatever our native tongue is, no matter what language they were written and posted in. That’ll be cool!
I hope they stick with it, and build on what we had at Cowbird. I’ll be right there, if and when I can be of any help, and ready to tell stories, once it’s up and running. In the meantime, we have Medium. It’s great to be here, to be a part of this new community that’s springing up out of the ashes of Cowbird.
Maybe we should call the new site they’re building, Phoenix? Out of the ashes it will spring. Whatever you call it, just don’t call me late for storytelling. I want to be there, on time.
