Bogged down in blogging

I've been so busy with bumpage and all, I've completely neglected my stories! I used to laugh at those friends of mine who had three, four or more stories on the go, but that's exactly where I'm at. How did it happen?

As a rule, I'm one of those people who likes to do one thing at a time and not start anything new until I'm finished. As a rule. The fact is, I've got a Harry Potter 'what happened next' story, Malfoy Redux, on hiatus and haven't even started on the edits so kindly provided by my friends for my Silmarillion gapfiller Mahtan's Apprentice. 

Added to that, I'm in the middle of a new story for the LOTR Community Challenges "Say it in a letter" challenge. I know! But it was only meant to take a couple of hours to knock out and post to Dreamflower, who is one of the mods. A kinder and more helpful person I have yet to meet, bless her. I do take my writing seriously; it's just that, when inspiration strikes, you keep on typing till all the words are out. To be honest, I'm a bit stuck on it. I know what I'm aiming for, it's getting the right words down that's stumping me. Well, it'll have to wait. It's not due till 25th February, anyway. At least my Teitho one is out.

What gives? Well, it's not just the bumpage. The fact is, I like to write, and I like to write so much that writing for various RL things such as internet trends has taken over. I didn't mean it to happen, honestly, but it just did.

Pure bumpage can be effected using Delicious, Netvibes, and Stumbleupon. Basically, it's permitted spamming, up to a point. Digg won't let you get away with it. They've banned posts about fanhistory wiki so my fanhistory wiki: WendWriter article doesn't get the boost it needs to raise it up the search results ranks. I sneaked Fanlore in there, so that's showing. 

So...

Bloglines will let you simply add feeds from the various websites you subscribe to your account. I copy and paste my Wikio articles to my blog there too, for bumpage purposes. Wikio, however, demands actual content. You can either write your own article, as I did, or add one from somewhere else. Just don't pretend it's yours, though. So, to get my Wikio thing to work, I had to write an actual article. There, for bumpage, I added links to my online activities, wikis, etc. It worked quite well, but only updating and adding to that site will continue the good bumpage work being done there. 

Well, during the course of my research, I discovered Squidoo. It's a great thing, that, but only the most linked ones get on to the search results page, so I've had to link it to my bumpage sites Delicious and Netvibes. I believe I Dugg it and added it to Bloglines. Adding the widgets to Squidoo took a fair amount of time, and it was so much fun to play with...! I had a bit of trouble with it because I'd given it too high a rating. By changing the rating, I've made it searchable. It was given an R for safety, but that got it listed with the porno sites and whatnot! Most of the stuff I've got on there is family-friendly. There are some scenes of violence in the videos I've linked and some of the websites I post on accept adult content, but there are no direct links to anything that would give Granny a heart attack.

Then I remembered I had an account on Suite 101 which I had never activated. I used it for commenting, and had left comments that I would, with hindsight, not have made if I'd realised I was going to end up being quoted here, there and everywhere. Yeah... other websites and blogs have linked to my LJ and other stuff, and basically, if I want to be taken seriously as a writer, I need to bury all the negative stuff. That's really what the bumpage is for: to hide stupid comments made in the heat of the moment because I got all worked up about something. 

Well I signed up as a contributing writer, and go by Wendy C- there, but they will emphatically not let me use it for bumpage. I can't write in this chatty, familiar style, either. Dang! It's how I like to write! It feels natural to write this way. But no, they want articles that are all professional and polished, with few links and a completely objective tone. I could get all pouty and point to the writers who have broken those rules, but the response would probably be, "Why do you want to write badly so badly?" I'd lose, so there's no point in arguing.

The result of all my Wikio wibblings is a series of articles that got me accepted onto a site where the standards are high and there's a hope of receiving a share of the advertising revenue. That's a good enough reason to get all distracted, isn't it? 

I've got nine more articles to write in the next three months. Let's hope I don't get distracted by fanfiction!