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Put the ice queens, princesses, witches, monsters, pirates, Doctors, and whatever other costume the kids wore away.  Halloween is almost ove...

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Deadlines

I meant to put a post every Sunday when I first started, but then real life got in the way.  I just didn't feel like posting or I couldn't decide what I wanted to write about.  Sometimes I'd know but not be near my computer to type it up for a post.  I knew a long time ago that I had an issue with deadlines.

In fact, it was this issue that made me ecstatic when I found the Helium.com back in 2006.  Then in 2008 it was bought out by a bigger company.  This was great until recently when after changing the set up and original website, they decided to close down the site.  This left several writers looking for new sites to write on.

I started on Helium because of its lack of deadlines but set areas to write for, including specific topics.  It had a system that allowed its members who wrote within a specific category to be the same ones to rate others without rating their own for consumption by others who might have looked into the same information that had been written.

Helium had fact-checkers to be certain that information wasn't bull-shitted just to add to a writer's possible income based upon reader traffic.  The reason given for the close-down of the website?  There wasn't enough traffic to the site.  This is all fine and dandy and Helium has given it's members plenty of time to get their articles back from the site and remove them.   The only problem with that is that some of these articles are considered to be creative writing.  Reworking one of these, especially the poetry pieces, for a different site so as not to be plagiarism is not as easy as one would think.

I rarely failed to meet school-imposed deadlines, however self-imposed ones are harder to keep.  When writing, my interests vary and I rarely seem to care while I'm typing about what's going on.  Case in point, my husband is currently watching Criminal Minds on Netflix and I happen to be listening to it while typing this post up.  However when my attention leaves I hunt for something else entertaining.  When it comes to writing it's a bit harder.

The muses take over my imagination based around things that interest me.  Sometimes stories change as things within change.  I do have a couple of stories on Fanfiction.net and numerous more in the works.  Among those, a few have taken turns that were not expected.  I even have a Yu-Gi-Oh Harry Potter crossover in the works that wasn't supposed to have certain characters involved in the story at all that suddenly included said characters in ways I hadn't planned.  This is why when NaNoWriMo comes around, I try not to plan.  Planning things for my writing never turns out the way I want, so I would rather not set myself up for disappointment because the story derailed from the original and I can't find inspiration to continue.

So even though I had set up in my mind that I would do a post every Sunday, I knew even when I started them that I would not be able to keep up with my self-imposed deadlines.