Apologies for the extra post (what do you all do with your week when you’re not hearing from me?), but I just published a piece through The Coffeelicious, a magazine on Medium.com, and since both of them are new for me, I’m going to shamelessly promote it. And introduce Medium to anyone who hasn’t explored it yet.

“I Pledge Allegiance to the–Queen?” is about taking U.K. citizenship, which turned out to be a surprisingly emotional issue for me. If you like the essay, it would be great if you’d hit the Recommend button at the end. If you don’t like it, you won’t reach the end, so don’t worry about it. (Seriously, I wouldn’t ask you to recommend anything you don’t like. It’s almost like–am I really going to say this?–faking an orgasm. Yes, apparently I am going to say that. I’m not sure what I think about it, never mind how I feel.)

Shockingly relevant graphic. Not mine. I found it on Wikimedia.

And with that out of the way, the rest of this is for those of you who either write more than blog fodder–and I know that’s a good number of you–or read more than blogs. Because not everything belongs in a blog, and I’ve been looking for outlets beyond mine. I’m hoping this will move me in that direction.

Medium describes itself as a place “where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends.” In theory, at least, it helps you find your audience. We’ll see. Technically, Medium makes it fairly easy to publish, although I obsessed about the mechanics for weeks before submitting anything, and only did it after investing something like $10 (it seems to be $12; never trust me with numbers) in a probably unnecessary but still helpful manual.

From what I’ve read, the good thing about Medium is that stories have a chance to build slowly–it’s not all about the first few hours, or days, or even weeks. Stories recommended by a lot of people become more visible. And we all like to believe that those are the best ones. They may be. It would be nice to think so. It also explains why I was asking people to hit that Recommend button. (I should mention that you have to sign up to recommend anything. It’s not a big deal, says the person who closes down her computer and hides under a chair when asked to sign up for anything. You can do it with Facebook or Twitter–and if you plan to publish on Medium, you should eventually add both connections.)

Medium also sets it up so that as a reader you can follow writers you like and get a notification when they publish something new (which, of course, lets writers, with luck, build a following) or follow magazines that filter and gather the work that’s most relevant to you. I’ve found some good writing there. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a browse.