Week 3: Success with Some Stories!

Many salutations to you all.

Week 3 was pretty successful! Here’s a quick TL;DR of what i did:

1. Completed a 2nd satire piece (in short story format) 

2. Completed a 3rd satire piece (in ad format) 

3. Published my 1st piece on Medium

Articles of the week

Science fiction of the 1900s

Tracking the Trump Criminal Cases

Ethnic Nationalismi/Genocide in Romania

Happy Birthday to All The Companies Who Love You

Writing

It was nice to take a bit of a break from research this week. I felt comfortable taking a week off from it considering I have 30 pages full of notes at the moment… Next week, however, I’ll get back to looking at historical leaders (like Aleksandar Vucic) as well as current affairs.  

I focused so much on writing, because I wanted to get a better feel of my writing style. Since I figured out that news satire isn’t accepted on comedy sites I had to dip my toes into other formats. The piece that I wrote this week, which I have dubbed ‘The Marketers Manifesto’, is more angry and outwardly sarcastic than my Wk 2 story. I wanted to dissect the rise of propaganda and how- because it’s so normalized in our daily lives- it’s harder for us to notice when it’s being used on a political/national scale. I had tried a couple different variations (from job application letters to convention award ceremonies) but they felt too lighthearted. The dictator I wanted to reference in this story, too, was an awful man by the name of Trujillo who was a mastermind at manipulation and committed genocide on thousands of Haitians. Not something I wanted to be tongue-in-cheek about…

Hence the manifesto. I could spin the marketer character to be selfish, power hungry, and repugnant, make some references to consumer culture, and then make him idolize Trujillo.  

Publishing

I found equal satisfaction in publishing as I did completing pieces. Drafting, outlining, and researching is great, but it doesn’t have an actual ‘end’ to it. I could easily pour hours more into furthering those and still feel like I hadn’t accomplished/produced anything. (Not saying this is a valid mentality, but it can feel like this!)  

So finally deciding on what blogging site to put my articles on was a relief :)! 

I had been debating between Medium, Write.as, and Neocities for a while, but settled on the first because of how popular it was. Just the satire tag alone has about 70 thousand usages (I.E. 70 thousand satirical pieces) and it also is home to larger satire ‘publishers’ like GreenerPastures or TheBelladonna. 

A great feature Medium has is its “Stats” section where it tracks how many readers, viewers, and commenters a story has had. A goal I have for the future is figuring out a way to attract more attention to my stories (to discover what topics/styles are better engaged with). The best way to do this would be to get my work published on satire sites like TheBelladonna or McSweeney’s. However, that’s not an easy thing to do… There is only one poor guy reviewing all of the submissions McSweeney’s gets, who is overloaded with tons of other brilliant pieces, and I’ve just started out! So my hope is to just get one of my works published. 

Closing Thoughts 

The more I write, the more submissions I’ll have to turn in, and (hopefully) the better I’ll be. Next week’s plan is to submit the two works I made this week, continue a little bit of light research, and begin planning my bigger piece. 

It’s been fun exploring the less strict world of writing, so we’ll see where it takes me 🙂 

Thanks for reading yall, have a lovely rest of your day.

P.S. The hourglass shape my intro took was completely unplanned. Sorry to those of you who find it annoyingly patterny