🎶One Step Closer🎶

This post has zero to do with music and only a teeny bit to do with Twilight the movie.

Terry L. Cooper
3 min readOct 3, 2023
Image by Tracy Lundgren from Pixabay

Yet another bite taken out of the long and seemingly never-ending list of things to do when you’ve been on this platform since July 2020. Three and a half years of writing here and now I’m working on leaving.

It’s like being in an abusive relationship.

I have in the past so I know of which I speak. No matter what you do it isn’t good enough. 1000+ posts on 20+ subjects and nothing. I have worked myself nearly to death at this point trying to make the powers that be happy including the readers. The problem is that the readers aren’t finding me. It’s like having a support network that’s willing to help you but they can’t locate you because your abuser has turned off all of your ways to communicate with them.

I’ve been an indie writer. I’ve been a publisher. I was an editor for five different publications a couple of years ago. Working as a slave for that group of publications almost did me in. 12-hour days of working (if you’ve ever been an editor you know it’s work) for free only to take shite from the publisher and the writers you said no to because they didn’t meet the guidelines and weren’t willing to make the necessary changes.

Sounds like an abusive relationship to me.

Everything has to be done in baby steps if you’re going to come out of it alive.

First, you have to hide your assets so you have something to live on while you regroup. I did a cleanup some months ago and Unlisted 227 posts. It’s no loss to me because they weren’t getting any eyeballs anyway. Plus if Baby Daddy decides to change his mind yet again and pimp us out for .10 cents per post, then that’s 227 less for those AI companies to get their hands on.

Second, you’ll have to diversify your assets. If you have all of your eggs in one basket and that basket is upset or stolen, then you’re SOL. That’s why I have a couple of posts up on Substack with more in the works. I’ve also signed onto another platform thinking I’d use it for the same niche as SubStack. I’m rethinking that decision now. Because…

Third, you have to find new housing so when you bounce you have a roof over your head. I have a very specific niche on Substack where posts that were here will be polished and posted there. I’ll be writing about my coming out party in a bit. Sidebar: I’ve read more than once in the last couple of days that writers who put out a lot of content will be less likely to get boosted. The thought is you aren’t taking your time to write quality work. You’re going after quantity. The polar opposite of what former Baby Daddy told us. ‘Feed the algo!’ was always the daily battle cry.

Last but not least, make sure you have enough stuff in your new house so that if you have to run out in the dark of night you can live semi-comfortably until you have everything you need. That equates to me having most if not all of my work from here, posted on one of the other two sites. That way if the Hammer of Thor rains down on me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I’ve downloaded my posts from here anyway and will do so every time I post something new. They decide to kick me off the platform, I have my toys and have no problem going home.

Stand by in the coming days before *poof*. And I’m gone.

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