After Four Months on Medium
By: Patrick M. Ohana
Tags: Four Months, Poetry, Stats, Nonfiction, Ｍedium

After Four Months on Medium

Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash

Right off the bat, I learned that most editors, readers, and writers on Medium are nice individuals, some of them, even lovable. I mean it. Mostly women, but a few good men. And talent is visible everywhere, and in many fields, though I wish they would write less about dogs. I’m a cat, after all. I mentioned most because nothing is perfect. I should, first, introduce myself, but it would ruin something of my mystique as the Santa Cat, though, by the way, is only wearing a blue suit for a few weeks to impress his muse, who loves red. It’s complicated.

I can at least let you know that I’m not an expert in anything, except perhaps for pain and suffering, both physical and mental, though only in my range, which may seem excessive to some and adequate to others. It’s a good range, I assure you. It includes kidney stones for over five bloody years. A wife that moved to Saturn over six years ago. The usual loss of a father, and ten years later, a mother, though the latter wasn’t for me such a big loss. I may have cried once; I don’t remember. But for my father it still happens that I do, even now as I’m typing these words. It’s also complicated.

So, that’s just the physical pain. Oh, there were and are others, but anything pales in comparison to a kidney stone. I would have killed myself if I had a gun. I may have been lucky not to own one, but to tell you the truth, there’s no difference in any relative sense, and as you may know, everything is relative. I just want to add before I forget and then need to add and thus edit, that the muse I mentioned before is real and is pseudo-named Crissey. And the reason I mention her here is that she influenced almost anything that I wrote from the last week of November and it’s going on and won’t stop as far as I know. Almost everything I write involves her in a big or little way. And it’s there; it’s easy to find; every time I use the word love. It’s probably one of the words that I use the most, especially since I met my muse. We never met. We probably never will. It’s also part of the pain and suffering.

But mental pain is the worse, and I’m sorry if I may have misled you, but I’m not referring to clinical mental illness but to anguish because of the brutality of Man, in all its forms; the history is worse than any Hell one could have imagined. And I assure you, the truth is much worse than what you know or think that you know. I’ve done my research for many years; that’s what I also did and still do in a different way in “real” life; presently only reporting on medical-related research.

But what does all this have to do with Medium?

That’s a fair question, I suppose. The answer is, almost everything. Maybe not the kidney stones, but everything else. The web of actions and reactions is as vast as the universe if each one action or reaction is measured as an inch, or my favourite centimetre, mostly because there are more interesting rhymes that go with it than those that go with inch. I tend to digress. Some may dislike it. My muse, however, loves it, and if I want to continue to be honest with you, I mostly write for her since the last week of November, to her, and then get to publish it on Medium, whether it’s on Blue Insights, Illumination, MuddyUm, Scrittura, Sensual Enchantment (Sensual: An Erotic Life), Sexual Tendencies, or Wordsmith Library, and several others. I used to write for In Fitness And In Health, but my muse is already fit and in health and thus, there’s not much to add to what I had already published there, but I will write something more elaborated on nutrition for my muse and Dr. Mehmet Yildiz and his new Technology Hits publication, although it may be more suitable for Illumination or its Curated counterpart, though I have yet to be granted the position of a curated writer.

What did I learn?

1 Complaining about not making any or enough money is a recurring theme on Medium. I understand it to a certain degree. It also depends on one’s reason for joining this global community of writers and readers. It’s a beautiful idea that seems to have come into fruition. I’m sure that Shakespeare would have been proud. The Bard is one of my passions. In literature, there is no greater writer and there will probably never be, no matter the language. The Bard is literature’s god. And I serve this god with sonnets and anything else I can muster for the glory of the Bard. It suddenly sounds like a religious rendition. This is also coming from the muse. She’s more into mysticism, and I, well I need facts; real ones; not those invented and repeated until they have the semblance of being facts. I mean verifiable and repeatable facts. But even more important than all these is irony (and satire and parody and allegory). As the late Christopher Hitchens (The Hitch) had mentioned many a time, lacking irony, life would be unbearable.

Having joined Medium on the last day of July and published on that day, I received a first pay of $0.01 for six (6) stories. I’m not kidding. There was a deposit of one cent into my account. At least no paper was wasted, I hope.

In August, I published 43 stories and the pay increased to $7.54. It was mostly fiction, nonfiction, and some poetry. Of course, nothing went viral. I wonder if we should keep using the word, viral. It lost all its previous meaning now that our lives have gone viral but in the opposite direction.

In September, I published 140 stories and the pay increased much further in this scale of pays to $66.01. Please note that about 75% of what I write involves poetry; mostly sonnets, haikus, and some seemingly free verse. The other 25% includes fiction and nonfiction. I also wrote a play and a screenplay that, of course, almost no one read given in part to the fact that they require more time than usual to read (22 min. for the play and 44 min. for the screenplay). Again, nothing went Shakespeare.

In October, I published 165 stories but the pay decreased to $36.86. The stats were different from the previous month; there were many more reads and claps. Maybe the lower pay owes to poetry being less valued in terms of the time that it takes to read. At any rate, a poet I’ve become and a poet I’ll remain, especially that my muse insists on it. Obviously, no story went Stephen King or even Martha Stewart.

In November, I published 170 stories and the pay increased to $62.75. Again, the stats were different from the previous month, with a significantly higher number of reads and claps. But poetry doesn’t pay, unless words are sufficient to offset this mode of recognition. “I loved your poem” could be enough.

Thus, in four months involving 524 stories, I received $173.17. At about eight hours a day of writing (often more, especially since I’ve been possessed by a muse), that’s a rate of about $0.17/hour, and thus I’m surely not in it for the money. But that’s just me. There are writers that make a decent living, though the highest yearly pay ever on Medium, according to a somewhat recent Medium memo, was close to $50K, which also is nothing out of the blue and into the light.

What else did I learn?

2 Words are powerful (even more than I thought). Some stories (in my case it’s mostly poetry) can deeply affect the reader. Some readers can even “fall in love” with writers on Medium, and vice versa. It’s more than surprising when it actually occurs to you. Except that most readers are also writers, and thus we end up with poetry couples (couplets), fiction pairs, and who knows, maybe even free verse threesomes and the like. Words have always been powerful. Shakespeare is a prominent example, not to talk about the power of the words shot by some dictators, an area to which I don’t want to digress. I’ve written enough about it both in Medium and before.

Did I learn anything else?

3 Writing is addictive. I never considered myself to be a writer before Medium. I had published four novels and a collection of short stories and I still thought of myself as someone who also wrote. I didn’t write everyday and thus I wasn’t a writer. Now, it’s all that I do, even in the middle of the night, looking at the Moon, thinking of my muse. She sends me most of the words at night. I’m becoming an owl. Too bad I can’t fly. But for the first time in my life, I consider myself a writer, and specifically, a poet, which is entirely due to my since-the-last-week-of-November muse.

Anything else?

I’ve surely learned several other things, but some things are better left unsaid. It may hurt someone’s feelings. And since they’re not that important, those other things, I won’t even mention any of them, except that it’s like reaching the Moon and complaining about the dust, whether it’s in or out. And that’s the least of the problems one should worry about when living on the Moon.

In closing…

Somewhere in the space

concealed between micro and

macro worlds we live aware of a wide

wedge, unaware of nearly

all the rest, whether within the micro

or throughout the macro planes

of being in M.

Patrick M. Ohana