Elephant Journal can kiss my fine writerly ass

You know how there are some days that just stand out?  Like the time your boyfriend surprised you with a sloth for your birthday or the time you discovered a tiger living in your apartment building?  You know, those days where something completely amazing or extreme or insane happened, and you don't just remember every detail -- you feel every detail.  You've got the sights, the sounds, the smells all queued up enhancing the memory, making it fat with meaning.  Fat with specialness.

Yesterday was one of those days for me.

Look, if you think I'm whipping out sloths and tigers in the next few moments, I'm letting you down right now.  I WISH there had been some animals involved, even just one -- besides Mr Burns, who continues to be an utter joy.  No, yesterday was all just about stupid human tricks -- no exotics.

I got up at my favorite Fuck-Yeah Early-Early Wake-up Time -- aka, 4:30 -- and got down to it.  Taking my writing teacher Susanna's words to heart, I sat down with a cup of coffee and started re-working a piece I wrote last October, for publication on Elephant Journal.  It's a piece about my experience at Wanderlust last year, which you can read in its revised entirety here if you wish.  By 6:00 am, I'd made the changes I wanted to make and was formatting it on the Elephant platform.  By 7:00 am, I was done, and hit the hills with Burnsy, trying not to obsess about the piece or the new website but really, really take in the trees.  Keep my head where my body was. 

If I could, allow me just to sing, again, the praises of the Fuck-Yeah Early-Early Wake-Up Time.  What's so wonderful about it for me is that I basically can get in 4 hours of whatever I want, before I have to head in to the job that keeps the lights on and the kibble flowing.  Four entire hours of writing, reading, hiking, scheming.  I figure if I get these 4 hours in before work, and I have roughly another 4 after work, then I can manage an entire 8-hour day of Shit I Want To Do even though I also devote 8 hours to sitting at my paid-desk.  That so works for me.  I'm an early bird but I'm no sleep-hater.  I'll admit that getting up that early is sometimes challenging.  But just for 5 seconds.  Then it's back to Fuck Yeah.

OK, so listen, everything was going great yesterday.  The post was on Elephant and I was watching the Views number tick up, playing a little game in my head of competing with Michelle Marchildon whose piece about mercury retrograde posted at about the same time as mine.  She was kicking my ass, but I wasn't too far behind. I had a delicious lunch outside with a colleague at the Marin County Farmer's Market -- really just the most glorious sunny winter day, utter perfection.  I could see the hills I'd hiked in that morning as I greedily consumed the most delicious fish taco ever.  

In the car, my phone informed me that Wanderlust had just tweeted a link to my piece on Elephant.   More than 11,000 people follow them!  I was stoked that they liked the piece enough to send it out to their people.  So awesome, right?  Everything in my master plan for world domination was well underway. I was jump-around happy, wagging , Snoopy-dancing, stoked.

And then I got back to my job, checked my personal email and set my jaw.  Here's what awaited me.

I won't lie.  I was both on the verge of tears and shaking-mad, super-disappointed and super-mad. Don't get me started on the whole etiquette aspect of this.  Really, in the Subject line?  That email was sent 20 minutes after the Wanderlust tweet.  On a day when some subset of the 11 THOUSAND people on Wanderlust's Twitter-feed might have a) read me b) on Elephant Journal, Elephant's editorial decision was to take the piece down, landing any clickers-through on an unhappy error page.  

What a wasted opportunity, and not just for me.

The part that made me sad -- ok, I admit that I was truly sad not to have the chance to get in front of all those sets of eyes, because YES, it's true: I just want to be read, loved maybe, but read for sure -- was that what I wrote got taken down BECAUSE OF MONEY.  Which is just so lame.  It reflects so poorly on Elephant and was really and truly the last straw for me.

Because I'm not going to lie: it's not my favorite.  I read the people I know who post on Ele, but mostly am completely uncomfortable with its overall prurient tone, sensational headlines, childish obsession with booty (and don't get me wrong: huge fan of booty over here).  I've published to Ele before of course.  Naturally, the piece of mine that had the most traction was my old "Retiring the Porno Pants" one.  To get eyes over there, you need sex in the title.  So yeah, that bugged, but I was willing to overlook that in favor of more eyes.  Oh wait, eyes who are willing to pay a $1 for the privilege of reading what's posted there.  MONEY again. 

But no more.  Elephant Journal can, as titled, kiss my fine writerly ass.  I don't respect what they're doing and I don't need them.  It does bum me out -- I don't want this hate-on over them -- but it's time to face facts.  They're bogus.  They can kiss my ass.

What's super-awesome is that even though those suckas pulled my writing down, everything turned out so much better than if they hadn't.  They did me the gigantic solid of showing themselves for who they really are -- so now I'm done, and that's a good thing.  But check out what happened next: I got a super-nice email from the co-founder of Wanderlust later in the afternoon, when I'd done my emotional highs and lows, my weeping and my gnashing, telling me how much he liked what I'd written because it spoke to why he started Wanderlust in the first place, "to bring people together and inspire them to follow their dreams." THAT right there is enough for me, to know that I was able to give something back to him, in thanks for the deep way that Wanderlust changed me, in unexpected ways, in lasting ways.  Super-awesome.

So yeah, yesterday was CRAZY.  But I learned so much.  I am standing so much taller on my own two feet, knowing I don't need some other website to move my writing in front of people.  I got it all right here, yo, and thanks to Ele's lame BS, I'm bringing it FOR FREE from my own heart, no middle man, straight to yours, 7 days a week, rain or shine, in sickness and in health, loving you forever to infinity and back.  

XO