Curie Didn’t Change My Life, It Affirmed It

"There's a platform you might like…”

That was the beginning of a conversation with my friend @beowulfoflegend that got me to sign up on Steemit. He’d been on the platform for over a year and have built up a reputation and following, seen Steem’s highs and lows, but he stuck with the mantra: It pays more than ad clicks.

I had a blog at the time, wrote urban fantasy that my publisher sold as urban fantasy while targeting it at fans of paranormal romance, because there’s a lot of overflow there. (Seriously. There is.) Amazon was slowly but surely becoming the place to buy eBooks, and self-publishing was fast becoming the preferred way to get your work out there because Amazon took a smaller cut of your royalties than a small ePress.

Then came word that my publisher was shutting down. The author stable didn’t find out in a communique from management, but rather a series of tweets from a disgruntled writer who suddenly found herself without a publishing house. For the romance and horror writers, it was damaging to say the least. For the Urban Fantasy and PNR writers, who tend to write trilogies and quinologies and septologies and larger, it was devastating.

All of my Urban Fantasy works to that point had been in one setting, and still are, with the center of it being a septology that I was four books into, and working on the fifth. Publishers, by the way, do not pick up a series in progress, meaning that my series would never see print without using a vanity press, and no serious writer ever wants to use a vanity press.

So I stopped writing.

I called it a hiatus, but I was already working as a professor, teaching composition to college students, and I loved the work, so I didn’t feel it was much of a loss. I had tabletop RPGs as a creative outlet, and figured I could close the book, so to speak, on my writing career.

“There’s a platform you might like…”

I didn’t have a smartphone at the time, I had to get a “pay as you go” phone from the local big box store. Our conversation was largely, “Hey, it’s pretty much free money.” I didn’t know how little money it was at first, but I finally had a place to post all the various blog entry ideas that had been piling up in my head, as well as have a chance to write creatively again.

I did my introduce yourself post, started posting other things to build content, and revived a project I’d put off for over a year, a new urban fantasy novel called “Four on the Floor”, and decided I’d post it on Steemit exclusively, and post links on my author page on Facebook and my Twitter page.

It got zero attention the first week, and Steemit was becoming rather discouraging for me. It wasn’t the upvotes, really, it was the view count that had me so crestfallen. I didn’t know (and still haven’t quite figured out) how to tag correctly, and I figured I’d hold off, keep posting “Four on the Floor” for myself.

And then I log in one night and see that the value of the post is over $80, that over 60 people have read it. I had no idea why, so I checked the upvote list, and near the top I saw @curie.

I honestly thought it was blind luck at first, but once I looked into how @curie works, I realized that someone had been leafing through the all of the new entries on the Writing channel, or maybe Fantasy, or Story, and happened on the second chapter of my serialized novel, and recommended it for curation. The upvotes are great, don’t get me wrong, a writer loves to be compensated for their work, but knowing that there are curators out there looking for undervalued or unrecognized works, who actually take the time to read them, and point them out to say, “This is the kind of quality that makes Steemit special”, is greatly affirming to an artist of any stripe.

My second @curie vote was just me trying to get my feelings out on a video game that made me cry and wish I could tell my Dad, now passed for over a decade, that we’ll never see eye to eye on a lot of things, but in the long run, we’re okay, and I’ll work hard on trying to forgive him. I wasn’t expecting the upvote, nor was I trying to get it, but the comments on that entry made it worth it, that people didn’t just see it as a game review, but a raw explanation of how the game affected me.

My third and most recent @curie upvote came from one of my great writing loves: Pop culture criticism. Hairspray is pretty much the only musical I’ll watch more than once, and I would annoy my husband to tears wanting to talk about the deeper readings of certain scenes, comparisons to other productions… I also told a student I was tutoring that you can get a three page paper out of anything, even a four minute scene in a film or TV special. She asked me to prove it, so I wrote the essay and posted it. Later that night I found that a curator had upvoted it, and later on a @Curie upvote followed.

I didn’t quit my day job over these upvotes, and the payouts were reinvested back into Steem Power because @Curie stands as one of the reasons for artists to bring their talents to Steemit: the pay is nice, but recognition is nicer. @Curie is the reason I got back into writing and love it again, how I went from maybe 500 words in a month to 1000-1500 words a day. It didn’t change my life, but it certainly affirmed a part of it that I had let fall by the wayside.

@Curie got me writing again, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. 😊

P.S. @Curie is also putting out a call for delegation. Please consider delegating, or following and supporting this amazing community. :)