Thank you to everyone who continued to follow us during this hiatus, and thank you especially to those submitting to us. We’re back, and better than ever. (I think? Hopefully?)
Just kidding, I have a lot of evidence for that claim. First off, you can now give us money.
Our patreon is up and running. We’ve got some cool rewards for donors, here. So be sure to check it out. Our ultimate goals are to be able to pay contributors and to print. But to do that, we have to set ourselves up as a nonprofit, which isn’t free. That being said, this is the biggest step we’ve taken in a long, long time, and the one that we originally envisioned when we started up. It’s just taken a long time to get there. Everyone tends to be doom and gloom about the state of literature in the digital age. But I truly believe that the internet has been an asset to our publication, and with your help, we can make it a paying asset.
Other minor things include an image change. We dug the millennial thing for a bit, but now we’re looking to expand our focus, and as we stride more confidently into adulthood we’re expecting the same from our audience and contributors. Besides, every once in a while we’d get talented people asking us if it was okay to submit despite being outside our demographic, and that makes us think that there were even more talented people who weren’t contributing. As a part of switching gears, we’re really changing the focus to be more about innovative works that push boundaries. You’re gonna see this in next week’s piece. Be excited. Are you excited? Good job, you did it.
Anyway, now that the news is out of the way, there’s something I really want to say, because it feels like it’s been too long since we’ve reminded everyone why we’re doing this.
I’m a writer. Technically, I’m a published poet and unpublished novelist. And something just doesn’t rub me right about how publishing is, now. Maybe it’s the knowledge that if some of the greatest short story writers of all time were alive today, it’d be hard for them to find an audience. The fact that this audience is huge (book sales have never gone down) even while the way that it absorbs content is stuck in the 20th century in a 21st century world. I’d be lying if I told you that the Metaworker is my dream. My dream is to write for a living. But as I’ve been around other writers, I’ve noticed how many other people have that same dream, and how few of us manage to make it happen. Look, I know not everyone’s dreams come true…but does it really have to be this few?
So let’s create opportunities. Let’s make spaces for art and put time and money into those spaces. Let’s not compete with other writers, but succeed together. I’ll still work on my novels, and my stories, and my poetry, and I’ll even fit in my day job. But if you did some good writing, you deserve to have your name and a title somewhere, and you deserve to have your work be both accessible and compensated in some sense. That’s one of my dreams.
Let’s make it happen.
P.S. I acknowledge the existence of April 1st. However, attempting any sort of prank would have really killed my groove, here.
