Fiction
A Fiction Writer has 50,000 Followers on Medium
Spoiler alert. It’s me.
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Four years ago I never thought I would be sitting here and writing this story.
In late 2018, I was looking for a new place to publish my work. I had a handful of stories written for some other blog I have been working on and didn’t know what to do with them. I read about medium and the new partner program and decided to give it a shot. I published a handful of stories and woke up the next day to comments and highlights and it’s pretty much just gone from there.
I can still remember that day I was sitting there with the medium editor open putting on “The Curious Case of Emma Lee” and hoping for the best. I never even planned on staying here for a month let alone years but I found this writing community and it’s worked out pretty well.
When I first started publishing here it was nearly unheard of to publish fiction. It was still mostly a tech blog and people were starting to publish personal essays here and there but you were far more likely to find an article on python or bitcoin then you were a story about werewolves or vampires. .
But I didn’t have much else to do at the time. I was between writing gigs and I took a shot in the dark. So I put my story in there, picked an image, wrote the title and took a deep breath before hitting publish. This would lead to all kinds of new opportunities and I can’t even begin to say how lucky I’ve been.
Still to this day fiction is more of a red headed step child here. But I like to think it’s changing. There’s still tons of clickbait and “how to make money on Medium” articles but there are also plenty of creatives. Now there’s been a move to more relational subjects and building communities around a writer then just relying as much on an algorithm and for some people like me that’s worked better.
Publishing here has helped me find all kinds of new characters. My good friend Jasper Ford has made plenty of appearances here as well as several characters I’ve gotten to know the last couple years.
About a year after publishing my first story, I would start the inkwell to house my fiction. It was back when everyone was creating their own publication so I…
