How I'll Be Getting Back to My Mission of Helping to Promote Unique Voices

The election season is winding down and that means we must turn the page and face the future

Hello Friends,

It's a beautiful autumn morning here in Northern Wisconsin. The leaves are at peak color, and as you walk or drive through the neighborhood it's like living in a perpetual sunrise. Normally this time of year I try to take my girls down to the park for a photo shoot. The sun is getting low in the sky, so magic hour lasts twice as long as normal.

My girls finished up their soccer season last weekend, but I still have swimming and cross-country meets to attend. Yesterday I was listening to

Jason Provencio

’s wonderful podcast and he spoke about how excited he was to go and watch an NBA game. That made me reflect on how long it has been since I attended a professional contest. These days, the only games I go to involve one or both of my daughters.

About a month ago, my mom came down to watch a soccer tournament where my kids were playing. We sat right along the sideline in our camp chairs. Often the ball would bounce our way and we'd have to toss it to a player. I know the names of every child on the team.

When my wife and I moved to the US from Peru, the first thing I did was purchase tickets to go and watch the Packers play the Vikings at Lambeau field. It happened to be the first game that Favre faced the Packers as the quarterback of the opposing team. It's really fun and exciting to watch a professional game. I suppose when my kids are a little older, I'll have time to do that again. But for the moment, I'm content to have my weekends dominated by grade school and high school contests. Both professional games and games involving your kids are exciting and memorable in their own way.

I was going to say that the games involving your kids are cheaper, but by the time you're done driving them and feeding them and paying assorted fees, I guess that's not really the case.

On Friday, I sat down for a conversation about racism with The Contraband Wagon. It was an interesting experience and I've been reflecting on it for the whole weekend.

As writers, I think we have to take advantage of any opportunity to participate on other platforms. We need to be able to speak in public, on the radio, on podcasts, and on television. We need to practice, practice, practice so that when opportunities arise we're ready to take advantage of them.

This is one of the reasons why I've been encouraging my writer friends to record voiceovers of their articles. Talking into a microphone has to become a daily occurrence. That's how you make quality innate. The more you practice the better you get and, perhaps more importantly, the more consistent you become. This means that if you ever get a chance to appear on a major platform, you can just do your standard appearance and succeed.

Consistent practice takes the pressure off you.

Before the interview started, I spent a few moments chatting with Will, the host. I told Will that his background and expertise makes him a great candidate for writing successful stories on Medium. I offered to give him some advice to help get an article or two Boosted.

Will was very kind, and he said that no other writer has ever offered to help him in that way. I received the same nice compliment from another of my writer friends on Medium a couple months ago. Those comments helped provide me with some perspective on Medium's current strategy.

As a Boost nominator, I'm on the lookout for quality work that will please the readers that populate that platform. It's sort of like a Boost nominator is a mini-agent. A mass market agent could get your work a six figure contract. A Boost nominator is like an agent that can place your story and get you three figure compensation (sometimes two, sometimes four).

Perhaps it sounds a little silly when I put it that way, but I really do love the opportunity and I believe in the program. Now, if you have a small follower count, or you don't choose a good title or featured image, you might not get a lot of views even on a Boosted story. However, the Boost concept is a great motivator to improve your work even as you build an audience.

I feel there's a lot of opportunity on Medium right now. A lot of the previously established writers have grown a little frustrated and aren't publishing as much over there. But the cardinal rule of writing is that everything is going to change. I see this in my own work all the time, particularly when I migrate it over to Substack.

Quite often I'll revisit an article I wrote two or three years ago and I'll be frustrated that it's not nearly at the quality level I remembered. This is true even on articles that made me thousands of dollars. They're not good enough!

I hope that means that I am improving as a writer. But it might also mean that the marketplace has changed so much that the quality work of two years ago simply isn't bankable anymore. It's the same as how the songs by the Everly Brothers might have been big hits in the 50s, but if you tried to release them today, they'd get little to no airplay.

The marketplace evolves, and writers must be mindful of the expectations of the platform.

I've scheduled another meeting with Will of the Contraband Wagon to discuss how he might be able to leverage Medium to get more visibility for his channel. I think he's doing very good work.

Much of my current status as a writer derives from an article I wrote back in 2015 that discussed how Trump's campaign had led to hostility against my Spanish speaking family. Anti-racism has always been one of my primary focuses in my work on Medium. I have a section in this newsletter called “Empowering Progressive Writers,” because I want to help other writers tell their story.

Over the last few weeks, election anxiety has pushed me off of this message to some extent. Thankfully, the election season is about to end, and there will be a need for writers to tell their stories for as long as there are human beings.

What's become distressingly clear over the last few months is that we simply cannot trust the corporate media. The cavalcade of lies, gaslighting, and misrepresentations is upsetting to endure. On the few instances when I encounter someone who is allowed to express something/anything that contains the inherent weight of truth, I find myself overjoyed.

I want to help other readers experience that more often, both in my writing and in the works of writers I discovered.

That's why I've identified Will as a good Boost candidate. During our conversation, I realized that I'd written articles on many of the topics we discussed. This allowed me to recall those arguments, and speak with a certain level of confidence. However, we also got into moments where I had to speak extemporaneously. I'm still a little reluctant to do that, because I prefer to offer grounded and reviewed opinions rather than opinions that sound good in the moment.

The thing to remember though, is that even the ideas that we believe to be tried and true need to be revised every few years. This connects to what I was saying before about reviewing my old articles and finding they're not as good as I remember them.

When I wrote those articles, the concept represented a personal breakthrough. Now that I've applied that breakthrough to my everyday life for several years, I've learned a few more things. The new things I've learned make the original article seem rudimentary.

This means you never run out of topics to write about. You can always revise, refine, and add clarity to your important observations of the past.

Early voting starts in my state tomorrow. We might already have passed the point where our message might have its maximum impact on the results. We're getting close to the time when we transition to life after the 2024 election. I'll go into the future knowing that I was on the right side of history, and I did everything I could think of to get the win.

The fight for equality is ongoing, and there will always be a need for valuable people to tell truthful stories that are based on the experiences that lead to wisdom. The general public hungers to listen to that kind of truth. There are kids and teenagers and young adults out there who desperately want to hear from kind spirits who don't want to exploit them.

We want to help them!

So, if you're one of those people, and you've seen a few common mistakes that young people make that can be easily corrected, please send me a pitch. Send it in the comments, I'm not hard to find. If I miss it the first time, send it again (sometimes I'm the target of bot swarms that threaten to turn me into a rug).

Once we connect, I will do what I can to help you get more eyes on your work. Successful writers help each other. Together, we rise.

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Thanks for reading everyone! As always, leave your questions or comments below!

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