Have the Delete Your Drafts Day for Our Blogs, but also Evil Author Day

Since this year was the leap year, this means that we also celebrated the 29th of February - the delete your drafts days. There were multiple posts I saw in this topic, Jeremy's, another Jeremy's and Aaron's. I have probably missed some, as this was from memory and quick browser history searching.

I actually think that going over the drafts and cleaning them periodically is a good idea. It does not really matter if it is a part of the spring cleaning. Or a day in a year, though a day every four years seems a bit long time between them - maybe I am just still young. It can be done in small bursts more regularly or in a decluttering march occasionally.

But then I occasionally hear people talking about how hard they find the whole blogging process. I head they had a therapy session about writing at the most recent IndieWeb Camp in Brighton.

And I was thinking if telling these people to delete the drafts is really the best idea?

Because if these are still drafts because the person lost interest in writing them, then deleting them is the best option. If they are drafts because of fear, then maybe so other principle would serve better?

My psychologist does tell me, that doing something despite a fear is a skill that we need for life. And even if fear never diminishes, the action still becomes easier and easier because we know how to deal with this fear. (Even though some fears do become smaller or disappear)

And then I remembered about the Evil Author day. It is celebrated in some parts of the fanfiction community on the 15th of February. On this day people can post their unfinished stories and probably also other art, with full intention to never finish this.

Here is one example of it with description. Some users just participate. You can also read a wiki page on it.

This allows the people to still partake in the joy of creation, even if it was not finished. It also allows the authors to not have to deal with perfectionism or with the guilt of why they are no longer interested in it. The solution in order to make sure we get the two cakes (The two cakes refers to the problem, where the artists compare themselves to betters, belittling their work, while people are just happy there is more work they enjoy).

So if it is perfectionism or fear that keep adding to drafts, then maybe instead of delete your drafts day, participate in the evil author day. Or maybe we could do it both - celebrate first the evil author day on the 15th of February, and the delete your drafts day on the last day of February. That way we could cover multiple reasons of why people have drafts they are not finishing.

I personally use both strategies all the time, not just on these specific days and I find them helpful.

Now if anybody finds the solution to the still being interested in finishing, but being more interesting in doing something else, then I would like to get the solution for this. Because all the drafts that I have are the ones that I am interested in eventually getting back to them, but I also know each of them will take hours of work. And I had found no solution to that yet.