As a freelance writer I’ve been writing stuff for paying clients for about 15 years now. As a web developer and content developer, I’ve been building websites, linking pages, posting on social media, and basically uploading my writing all over the web for just as long. As you can imagine, it is impossible for me to remember everything I have ever written, and everywhere I have ever published it.
Space on computer disk drives is easy to come by with every upgrade, so I still have a Microsoft Word copy of almost everything that I have ever written in Microsoft Word. Now that Microsoft has me paying monthly for Office 365, or whatever they are calling it this week, I have even more storage, and a synchronized copy. Unfortunately, that does not encompass all of my published writing.
I have on many occasions, such as this one, written directly into the WordPress editor. There are advantages to doing so. No need to copy and paste. You can format, kind of, as you go, and most importantly, you can link to resources as you think of them instead of trying to remember where you planned to link your articles too. I’ve dumped numerous words into various publishing platforms over the years as well. Some still exist, some don’t. I can still find my stuff on HubPages and eZines, for example, but I think any trace of me has been erased from the likes of eHow and Bright Hub. I dabble in trying other platforms like Medium when I have the spare time (Hah!). Of course, I have LinkedIn, although I’ve never put much effort into it.
There are many words of mine out there floating around without any attribution to me. Sometimes that was the arrangement from the beginning. Much of what I get paid to write comes with the understanding that my name won’t be on it, even if the client doesn’t try to pass it off as their own creation. Sometimes, what I wrote loses the attribution to me as website age, merge, and update. Other times, straight up plagiarism, usually via a bot program has taken my words and reproduced them somewhere, sometimes with my name still attached. Every once and a while my writing lives through all the change. It always makes me smile when I find my words from years and years ago floating around the web.
I don’t worry so much about getting credit for what I write, especially if I was already paid, or if I have already reaped the rewards I was after as I hit publish.
What I do worry about is writing the same thing again.
I still don’t know how much of what goes on in my head is the normal stuff that goes on in everyone’s head, and how much differs thanks to my ADHD, and/or being a writer. I often think that the thing that makes someone a natural writer is a non-stop dialog running inside their head. For me, that dialog suggests writing topics frequently. Just as frequently, it takes off and starts writing the article inside the walls of my mind. If I had a way to pop every great article, story, or book I wrote in my head out into the physical world somehow, I’d be a very rich man. Unfortunately, all too often, I have no opportunity to pull the words from my mind. Instead, they float away back into those memories that you can’t access, before being deleted forever.
The issue then is that I remember writing things that I never actually wrote. This very post was started only after I used a custom Google search that covers the websites where I publish most frequently. I didn’t find a post about trying to remember if I wrote something before, so here we are. Even now, as I abandon this post to return to the plethora of tasks that were already sitting on my list before this idea popped into my head and demanded to be let out, I leave behind a fraction of what I wanted to write. I’ll tell myself that I will come back and finish it, edit it, and make it what it deserved to be, but my brain and I both know this is likely it. Another blog post on my freelance writing blog that probably doesn’t really belong here.
Who knows?
Maybe I will make it back. In the meantime, I apologize for the stream of consciousness brain dump. Please look around at the rest of this writing blog and my freelance writing business.