Man, I did not intend to disappear for so long. I caught some sort of upper respiratory infection that has mostly kept me in coughing fits all week. Sorry, y’all.
The week before, I intentionally left out any updates because I wanted to keep the Quest in the Realms stuff at the top of my most recent postings. In retrospect, I don’t know if that mattered at all; it certainly didn’t help build any traction for the posts. A mini-Curie rolled through like a distracted tumbleweed on one of my entries, but that was about it. The project in general did fairly well, with others gaining Curie votes. Kudos to those Bananafish Knights: @f3nix, @dirge, @calluna, @ntowl, @marcoriccardi, and @cyemela. Overall, though, yeah, lessons learned about marketing and promoting and all that.
So let’s talk promotion.
Take a gander at my reworked article “How Neoliberalism Failed to Keep Fascism at Bay.” That shit went viral (or at least semi-infectious), garnering 6k views over the course of a few days. Hell, there were even whole arguments about it on Reddit. For reference, the most views any of my previous Medium entries gained was 83, so...that was quite the jump. I mostly sat around gawking at the numbers going up and repeatedly asking my wife, “What is happening right now???”
Unfortunately, then I got sick and haven’t written jack since. :(
Last week, I did revise a bunch of fiction and submitted it all over the Internet. I’ll let you all know as the rejections/acceptances roll in. These ones were all for paying publications. Fingers crossed.
In between delirium and coughing fits this week, I’ve been updating my resume and putting together a cover letter. I help other people with this kind of stuff for a living, but writing them for oneself is tough. It’s been slow-going, which has also halted my other writing process.
Kind of randomly, I also started reading Dune. My only judgments so far: 1) wow, this is going to be epic; 2) I appreciate Frank Herbert working in all these naive characters at the beginning to help with exposition; 3) I find the religious text introductions to each chapter intriguing…
More updates to come!
Oh, also, if you've read my "Asleep in Nara" story, then I hope you'll enjoy this beauty:
credit goes to Ali Axelrod
(feel free to email me at michaias.grigori@gmail.com if you'd like the artist's contact info)