I’ve Been Dragged Away from Medium

The Man says I need to get my lazy ass into work

Those stats make grim reading. After a sustained period of single-figure activity, I finally started to gain some traction on Medium. I was posting regularly, and my stats improved to the extent that I hit seventy views in a day. Chicken feed to many, I know, but after being down in the single-figure doldrums for all eternity it was a marked improvement. Then, the whole thing came crashing down like a Jenga tower, or, if you prefer, I slid down the long snake back to square one.

I had tried to scrape a living freelancing, hoping to bring in a small but steady trickle from online platforms like this, supplemented by published magazine articles, and perhaps some bartender work. Of course, as soon as I joined Medium, I applied my King Midas in Reverse touch and things changed. All of a sudden people were complaining that they couldn’t make decent money on the platform anymore. My bad.

Yada, yada, yada

In the end, The Man pulled the plug on my writing enterprise, and I was summoned to the local job centre to discuss finding a real job. The upshot of that is that I now have to spend 35 hours per week on job applications and suchlike, so the time I can dedicate to writing for pleasure has been drastically cut. And I hate it.