Draft Folder Solution
Confusing? Yes, Until it Wasn’t
I just made my life here at Medium a little bit easier. It’s because I get confused more now than I ever did before. Perhaps it has to do with my age, or perhaps it has to do with not eating breakfast at a decent hour and falling blood glucose levels. Whatever the reason, I find it annoying.
Over time, I’ve collected a number of articles that got stuffed into my drafts folder. There is one I put there deliberately that has to do with the technical parts of being a Medium writer. Like how exactly do I put a kicker above a title? What’s going on now is there are a bunch of articles that I have scheduled for the latter part of October and every other day throughout November while I plan to be busy writing for the NaNoWriMo challenge. 50,000 words written in 30 days. In short, a novel. Short, perhaps, but a book.
I decided this morning to begin taking some of those partially finished drafts, polishing them up, and, if possible, use them to fill in the spaces in November.
Except, then I got confused. I keep an Excel spreadsheet where I record my views (no longer counted as reads, which has still got me confused), my followers, and any money I earn (2¢ yesterday). I also write when I publish my stories. That way, I can see at a glance that I missed three days in a row, and I’d best get busy. Because I’m scheduling these articles in advance, I want to make sure I’m on target. I also keep copies of all the pieces I write in a Word document. The problem this morning was my counts were off. Excel and Word matched, but I couldn’t tell easily, looking at my Medium Story Page, just what was going on.
Another important reason to keep track of the pieces is that I update my Table of Contents at Medium every month. If you look at somebody’s stories the way Medium has them set up, if there are a lot of stories, you end up scrolling and scrolling until you finally give up. With a Table of Contents (link below), it’s easy enough to see what’s going on with a writer. It’s just easier to find stories that way.
My solution was to do a screen print of the table of contents in my Word document and compare it against the draft section of my Stories Page at Medium. Then, I started checking things off. I had to go into each story to make sure the scheduled date corresponded to what I had on file.
I’m telling you, the more tired I get, the more confused I get and the longer the task becomes.
My solution once I knew I was okay again and actually had been okay all along? I changed the titles on those draft pieces that were really and truly not finished. They look like this now: ** Not Finished ** Music and the People Who Can Transport You.
Why hadn’t I done that in the beginning? I don’t know. Maybe it just took a major round of confusion this morning, with me getting madder than a wet hen, for me to fix it.
Lessons learned. Eat breakfast at a good time, calm down, and think rationally. I won’t be confused forever.
The Links: NaNoWriMo — There’s still time to sign up!