When I made my pledge for the 30-day writing challenge, I wanted more money and followers. I felt like I was stuck in a writing rut and not reaching my full potential. In essence, I felt I deserved more due to my commitment to this platform.

After completing the challenge on June 17th and successfully submitting thirty articles to different publications over the course of thirty days, I can spare you the suspense and say I didn’t earn more money, despite my best efforts. This shows that this platform doesn’t owe us anything, and it’s not always about quantity.

Despite…

Being original as a writer is hard. You’ll often feel like everything you write has been said before in a slightly different way. What makes this harder is there are more writers online than ever before. So it can be hard to stick out and make a difference.

That being said, it’s not impossible. In fact, you have all you need to be original. As long as you are unapologetically yourself, and that shows in your work, you will find your voice and originality.

People will keep coming back to your work because it’s new and original. It doesn’t have…

It’s suddenly got hot in England. Really hot. From having a week's worth of rain and a cool breeze to suddenly being in a full-blown heatwave. It’s safe to say that many of us haven’t known what to wear with this sudden influx of heat. What’s worse is that it has coincided with the country opening up from a third lockdown.

This time last year, nobody really saw a lot of our bodies. We could lounge around in our houses and gardens in our underwear or bikinis and not have a care in the world. …

“Everyone has a book in them, but in most cases, that’s where it should stay.”— Christopher Hitchens.

Agree or disagree? There’s a lot to discuss here.

After coming across this quote, it got me thinking. All kinds of people dream of having a book published one day and will view it as the pinnacle moment of their career if they succeed. It’s often a goal many of us work towards, myself included.

In an age of self-publishing and gradually working towards greater inclusivity within the industry, it could be argued it’s now easier than ever to publish a book. …

When we typically think of family, we associate it with people who are related by blood. That’s the standard. Even if we have somewhat deviated from the traditional notion of a nuclear family — a group compromising a father, mother, and children — the attachment to blood relatives and the typical family model holds strong.

But the truth is, like friends, family is what you make of it.

The argument is often that you can’t choose your family — which is wrong. For many reasons, some people do not get on with their blood relatives and choose to distance themselves…

In our day to day lives, we’re constantly reminded of the fragility of time. How days and weeks can drag by, but when we stop and think, all of a sudden, years seem to have passed in an instant. Of course, time itself is a social construct, but we are all limited by it.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a universal reminder that life is precious. It’s short and never guaranteed. Although our daily lives can be hectic, they will pass us by if we let them. Before we know it, we’ll run out of time.

That’s the thing about…

Encouraging yourself to write in any form of regularity is hard. You’ll hit hurdles, run out of ideas and may even lose the love of writing that made you start in the first place along the way. It’s a process, and like anything in life, it will have its ups and downs.

I’ve been writing solidly online for ten months and am coming to the end of a thirty-day writing challenge where I have written a new article every day to a new publication for a whole month. …

Imagine if any other social media or blogging platform unexpectedly paid some of their writers a bonus? We would be singing their praises through the rooftops.

Medium isn’t perfect. For one, it is incredibly anglo-centric and makes it almost impossible for people from India and around the world to be paid. But it's far better than many alternatives out there, yet people are still complaining about it.

Despite all the murmurings of it being the end for the platform and the idea that its heyday has now passed, this is just the beginning. …