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Being Spanked by the Gatekeeper
Medium has spoiled me rotten
I’m fashionably late to every party. Ask me when I finally got around to seeing the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (2010). When a certain new player in the write-for-money party (their name rhymes with heartache) came on the scene offering Big Payouts to writers who — if memory serves — published 12 accepted stories each month I was skeptical.
At the time, I was hauling in a cool $300 a week in unemployment benefits and I wasn’t ready to jeopardize that for some johnny come lately. Nope. Thanks, I’ll stick with gatekeeperless pennies, thankyouverymuch.
But the time came when the siren song of a wider audience, one that wasn’t comprised mostly of writers eager to do follow for follows, worked its magic on me. There was certainly a learning curve, but some sixty stories or so later, I thought I was getting a handle on this gatekeeper business.
I was wrong.
That’s right, my second strike. Actually, my third but I successfully appealed this one. Someone, somewhere didn’t like this photo that accompanied a piece I wrote on how RT doesn’t report the news either.
