Canon Fodder is now available — Dear Medium readers, I’d like to announce that my new poetry collection, Canon Fodder: Poems Inspired by Classic Literature, is now available for purchase on Amazon in hardcover and paperback. To say I am proud of this work would be a grievous understatement. These poems, and one piece of short…

It did not meet Distribution Standards — Yesterday Medium finally announced the winners of their crazy contest, The Medium Writer’s Challenge. Let’s be honest, the whole circus was a shit show. It was poorly organized, they pushed back deadlines on judging, no one knew what was going on with it behind the scenes, how it was being…

And how you can too with your writing — Making money on Medium is easy. It’s so easy in fact, everyone is doing it. How do I know everyone is doing it? Because every time I log into Medium I am told about it by a multitude of articles bragging about how easy it is to do. I’m told…

The writer your mother warned you about — Hello, fellow Medium addicts. My name is Jay Sizemore. You may recognize me from such films as “The Poet With Borderline Personality Disorder” or “How to Alienate an Entire Genre of Writers in Five Easy Moves.” I actually have an undiagnosed case of mild Tourette’s Syndrome, which I believe was…

Poem for a grieving friend — How much a father means to a man ~for John It’s like trying to measure happiness or the distance between the self and the bottom of the sea, never a constant, a constant shift in depth. After the fact, you may find yourself sorting through empirical data, compartmentalizing grief, unable to throw…

It was not easy, but you can do it too — This week, I achieved a goal I had almost come to believe an impossibility. I published my first novel. I did this while working a steady full-time job, of forty hour work weeks. The key to successful completion of the task, was hard work, and consistency. If you’ve been wondering…

Here’s why — James Cameron has officially jumped the shark, or, erm, jumped the whale. His extravagant three hour sequel to his landmark 3D film of thirteen years ago is nothing short of a vanity project, one that is much more interested in showing audiences what it CAN do, rather than breaking any…

a poem — Small talk So it’s nearly October, and you’ve just turned 44. Suddenly, your dog is allergic to everything, his skin flashing bright pink after every trip outdoors, and you understand fear and empathy in surprisingly new ways. Last summer, your wife spent nine thousand dollars on landscaping. This summer, the moles…