A Thousand Words A Day
Keeping the Daily SPUF going with an article a day every single day might have seemed pretty easy back in 2013-2015 when the Steam User Forums were busy and filled with actual people, back when there were more people with opinions who wanted to make those opinions known. While not everyone was a fan of the article format, there was enough traffic for me to be able to schedule weeks’ worth of articles. Zoom forward today and it’s been a pretty desperate struggle just to make sure to have 3 days of articles scheduled in advance. While the Daily SPUF itself has reached over 2500 articles (wait, that was back in early December 2019… what?), the number of articles not written by me hangs at a measly 40%. We’ve reached the point where nearly 60% of all the articles on this website are written by me.
At minimum, this means I need to write an article every single day. Currently I have 4 days worth of articles scheduled, and I have to write a new article every day to replace the article that gets published every day. Having 3-5 days of articles is pretty alright, but it does mean I have far less time to write more articles if I don’t get a chance to, well, write.
But at the same time, I’ve been wanting to write my own personal stuff. In the past, back when I had more backup articles but also at least two weeks’ worth of articles in the Pending section, I’d be able to do a couple of Daily SPUF articles and do some of my own writing and be able to alternate as I pleased. Now that I no longer have a nice collection of backup articles I can schedule whenever I want, I have to up my writing game. And that means that my 500 words a day has turned permanently into 1000 words a day.
And frankly, it’s wearing me down. That’s double the amount of writing I need to do. And it’s not really optional, not unless I want to stop writing my non-Daily SPUF stuff for a bit. Which I don’t. Because I want to continue writing about my own little silly fictional universe as well. Sometimes though, I do put my personal writing aside to write an extra Daily SPUF article. this gives me an extra day of leeway but that leeway disappears the next day.
So how am I keeping my writing spirits up now? In the past, I wrote about how I’d keep on writing and what motivated me and- holy crap that article was written back in 2018! Where was I? You can see how easily I get sidetracked. It happens a lot and has really upped the amount of time it takes for me to write an article. Combined with very little going on in Pokemon Go (there’s not that much you can write about new Pokemon unless they upset the meta greatly or there’s a major change) and Warframe, the game that replaced Team Fortress 2 as the most-written-about topic on this site, has been having major troubles lately, what with their last two major updates being kinda shit.
Well, it’s mostly stubbornness that’s keeping me afloat. We hit 2500 articles. We’ve got to get to 5000 articles. Even if that’s going to take us another six or seven years. I have to keep on writing because if I stop, I won’t start again. There’s nothing I can do apart from continuing to write, so that’s what I’m going to do. And none of you can stop me.
Although that’s a good point. You all can help me. And by helping me, I don’t mean that I’m going to make you write articles.. although that is completely an option, we have a whole section on how readers can contribute. But readers don’t have to write articles. Instead, you could suggest things for me to write?
Yes? No? Maybe?
Oh well. Anyway, I gotta get back to writing…