Written April 2, 2022.

I used to get asked about this frequently. When I was in college full time, people wanted to know how I was able to continue posting on here.

A lot of people take massive breaks on here, especially during their first few semesters of college. While this happened to me a couple of times, I did my best to avoid ghosting the site permanently.

I tried a lot of different things, but these are the main two that seemed to stick for me. Certain methods seemed to be more helpful on certain days, or during different points in the college term.

Over all, when I was in college and on Wattpad, I did find strategies to help balance the two.

First off, I did a lot of pre-writing.

For me, this meant that when I did have massive amounts of down time, I'd write up a handful of posts and then send them out at regular intervals. I did it a lot during August and September, when I could, because for some reason fall term seemed to have the slowest start.

When I had three or four posts already lined up, I could pick which one I wanted to put out on which day. Then, I'd put them in order and hit "publish" before I went to class or during a break in classes.

Even if I was covered up with classes on a certain day, this used to help me with posting material on a scheduled date. I did this some with School of Secrets and Remnants of Reality when I had written the chapters ahead of time, but it worked better for Randomness since this book isn't strict on plotline.

I also tried to plan for writing time.

This was easy when I had creative writing group;s going on. If there was a club or group meeting, I could spend that hour or two writing prompts or other posts. It was already built into my week. No matter what else I had going on, if I was at a meeting, that was writing time. This was helpful during midterms, because I was taking some time to decompress, and getting ahead in Wattpad material at the same time.

When I didn't have a creative writing group going on, things tended to get a bit out of hand. Sometimes, I would forget to schedule in that writing time. These were times when my posts started appearing on more random days, without any sort of set upload dates.

In stretches of time like this, once I realized what was going on, I would set time limits and force myself to sit down and focus. Usually, this meant spending thirty minutes writing on a given topic, then stepping away to go back to homework.

Sometimes, this would happen once a week, sometimes I would try for two or three times a week.

This strategy was helpful for book reviews, especially when I had notes. If I had my notes split into sections, I could do one review a week. I would schedule in thirty minutes to write each section for a longer review, or complete entire, one-chapter reviews during one period.

The downside to this one is that, with reviews, I have to be in the right mindset. So, if I was worrying about midterms or a final exam, I was better off spending that Time on more stream-of-consciousness writing instead of pushing myself to do something structured.