Dead Articles
Being a new year and a new decade, sometimes I think about clearing out all the backlogs and finishing off a lot of unfinished stuff. After all, every time I log in to the Daily SPUF to write an article, I am met with the same old message, the same reminder that there are nearly a hundred articles sitting in the Drafts section, unwanted and unloved. The same goes for the Pending section, which is currently sparsely populated with four mediocre backup articles that I can schedule if I really fuck up and don’t have anything else to publish.
But the more I look at the Drafts section, the more it scares me. The Drafts section sits in a blackened corner, snarling and lashing out, turning into a hideous, unfinished beast, snapping at me like the monster it is. Frankly, I go into the Drafts section so you all don’t have to.
Why is this though? Why am I unable to go through and finish what I started? Why IS that Drafts section so weirdly scary? And why are there nearly 100 abandoned articles in there?
Well, a lot of those articles are written by old SPUFers who never really finished said articles, written when the Daily SPUF was so young that aabicus was writing it and I was hosting this site. Some of these articles are from when I was just a contributor, barely writing much at all and long, long before I was doing my 500 words a day thing. And since these articles are written by other people, I can’t just jump in and start writing for them, because I don’t want to put words in their mouth. Some of the authors, I don’t even know who they are, especially since the only contact information I have for some of them are email addresses and some of the older accounts don’t even have an email address attached to them.
Even if I could contact these people though, I don’t think I could do their articles justice. The oldest dead articles, right at the bottom of the Drafts section’s belly, are about sniping in Team Fortress 2, the premises of these articles written by a top-tier sniper who would kick ass back in the old SPUF days. There’s no way I can write up to that standard, but I can totally see why they would love a map like CTF_Turbine, with its absolutely MASSIVE lines of sight. Sure, I could go and adopt a lot of these dead, abandoned and orphaned articles, but I don’t think I could do them justice. Even the ones which have nothing written in them, just a title.
There are, however, a lot of unfinished articles written by me. That makes sense, I have written about half of all the articles on this blog, but many of these dead, abandoned articles are still mine, unfinished and frankly unwanted. Some of these articles are old SPUF projects that would make no sense now, like the old Character Annihilation series, which started off with a guy trying to screw his favourite weapon and fizzled out after the 8th story, even though I had planned an entire, long-reaching series. I don’t even remember what the two remaining drafts, titled Midas and Pink, were going to be about.
Other unfinished articles are ones I realized would be a bit too much work or wouldn’t plan out the way I hoped. But really, the reason for most of those unfinished articles is because I don’t think people would want to read them. They’re either too ramble-y and ‘out there’ or too weird or just not really fleshed out well as a topic overall.
Although, somewhat ironically, that hasn’t stopped me writing this article…