On Winning and Losing

Recently, the pleasant surprise of placement on the Vocal Bonus Leaderboard sent me down a rabbit hole. Now, rabbit holes are a pretty common place for me to spend time, but I don't always feel the call to write about them. To be honest, the thought of sharing some of them mortifies me.

Maybe it's a sign of my current stage of life, but this particular one occupied an unfair share of my time. After examining its scratched-out walls and inhaling the damp, moldy scent, not to mention eating a bit of dirt, I thought I'd share a few things I've learned about myself and how I perceive those two concepts in the title. (← That's a really long sentence. My editor should have caught it. I should fire him.)

Please feel free to stop reading now, and know that I'll forgive any eye rolls and thoughts like, “Here he goes again!” In return, I'll ask that you forgive my self-indulgence in writing this piece.

Since this exercise started with Vocal, I'll start there.

I am not the Vocal staff's biggest fan, and I'm well aware that the feeling is mutual. I have my reasons, and so do they. Both are valid, to a point. However, I'm not here to complain. The fact is, I'm still supporting the platform with a V+ subscription and, more importantly, touting its value and encouraging others to join.

I am a fan of, and firm believer in, the Vocal community. While it's important that the platform exists, it's the creators and the readers that make it work. In fact, lack of support from this community can easily work against a writer, emotionally and monetarily. (Now that I've used the “m” word, let me say that I'll be the first to admit that if you're writing on Vocal for profit, you're on the wrong platform.)

To get to the point, (You're welcome.) winning on Vocal, to me, is only partially about awards and their rewards. (See what I did there?) For instance, Leaderboard placement is the best of both worlds. It comes with a little monetary bonus, but it's due to community engagement and that's priceless. Fellow creators not only read your work but took the time to leave their thoughts on it.

There's another facet to Vocal, though, and that's the time that I invest in writing (and reading) here. Given that I write for a living, the time I spend here could be considered a poor investment, better spent on paid projects or publishing elsewhere. In reality, that thought couldn't be more misguided.

To begin with, participating on Vocal helps me keep my mind and my creative edge sharp. Not only do I get tons of feedback, I get to enjoy reading the work of amazing creatives and leave feedback for them.

This platform holds more of my poetry than any other so far, and I've been writing poetry since I was a kid. (A looooong time ago.) I had completely ignored fiction writing for decades until I decided to take another stab at it here. If you look at my early stories, you'll find that they're mostly autobiographical. I can't begin to describe how much fun it's been sticking my toes in the fiction pool, then jumping in headfirst. I'm not drowning yet, so that's a win, in my book.

On the practical side, I retain my copyright to everything I publish here. I can use all or part of it anywhere else I choose, and republish any of it elsewhere, in whole or in part. It's mine. That fact is one of the most important factors in writing here, in my opinion and I unabashedly thank the Vocal Powers that Be for maintaining that policy.

I will be taking advantage of that very soon, as I finally have a solid game plan for “real world” publishing of some of my stories that have done well here. Yes, that's another win.

Now, for those of you thinking I'm just going to laud Vocal, there have been a couple of losses. The worst is that I, along with other creators have had work plagiarized. I'll follow that up by saying it's something you can expect if you publish any of your creative work on any platform, including hard copy publishing. What was unexpected was the fact that the plagiarized work was posted on this platform. A small win was that the Vocal Team implemented algorithms that, hopefully are helping them eliminate those issues.

Unfortunately, there's another side to the plagiarism issue. The Vocal platform allows people to sign up as readers, and there's always a contingent of “creators” who leave a comment to “tag” your stories to be plagiarized. Yes, I know it happens because I see their recruiting posts on freelancing platforms. To be fair, this, too, is somewhat difficult to control and I don't doubt that the Vocal Team is doing their best to combat it.

In one more instance, a line from one of my poems was almost immediately used as a title and repeated line for someone else's poem and that poem won the challenge both poems were entered in. Coincidence? Maybe. Plagiarism? Perhaps. Water under the bridge a long time ago, but it was a loss.

So, you see, the losses are somewhat debatable and the wins outweigh them. In my opinion, the Vocal platform is a valuable asset, because of the community. It's also worth investing a small monthly fee to maintain V+ status, not only for the perks, but to give a little something in support. There's another recent loss associated with that, but I digress.

Interestingly, my life's win-to-loss ratio is very much the same, but that's another rabbit hole entirely. I can sum it up with a quote:

“I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.” ~ Joe Walsh, Life's Been Good

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