No apologies needed. It's fine. I'm happy that you liked my prompt that much.

Another reason for not publishing before being added is that most publications will not accept published work. There are a few reasons for this, including needing to do some editing, and also because Medium publishes in chronological order, when your story is added to a publication, it still shows up in the order of dates of publishing.

So your story, published 2 days ago, does not show up at the top of the list where it would be seen by people for a while before others were published after it. You'll see on the FLF home page that your story appears after several others, whereas if you had been added as a writer first, and then submitted your draft, today it would be at the top of the list and be in the limelight where others would be more likely to see it.

So always submit drafts to any publication. Mostly that's what they want anyway, but it's also in your best interests to have your story seen by more people :)