  Contests & Activities
This week: Finding Time Edited by: 🦄🏳️🌈Sapph  
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The purpose of this newsletter is to share my thoughts, ideas, and experience with anything and everything relating to contests and activities. Information from me to you on entering and running activities here on Writing.Com.
Today's Topic
Finding Time |
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In the past year, I've realized just how hard it can be to be active here on WDC and in the real world. Offline I'm currently a full time graduate student in the middle of my thesis, fly across the country to go home on a semi-regular basis, and run a very active club in my department. Online I help run a couple of groups, host a contest and enjoy helping out with activities, both my own and others around the site.
As you can imagine, all of this makes it difficult to fit in everything I would like to during any day, week or even month. I know I'm not the only one who has these kinds of commitments, so how do we get everything done? The answer is simple: very carefully. All activities have to be planned, written down twice and triple checked.
Finding balance with all of these is one of the hardest things to do, so here are a few tips that I follow:
 Use a calendar. This is my top organization method because everything can be put in with dates and times, so you know what you should do when.
 If you don't use a calendar, dry erase boards are amazing. I keep everything written on them and have separate ones for different tasks.
 Use your own judgement on whether or not you can really take on that new activity or group.
 If you're working on more than one thing at once, set aside specific times for each and stick to that schedule.
 If you run a lot of activities or groups yourself, delegate the responsibilities. Have members who are able to help out with various aspects and lighten your personal workload and get them more involved at the same time.
 Take a break once in a while. Relax and focus on yourself and then dedicate your time back into everything else.
You can manage to do what you want here and offline so long as you manage your time well. Sometimes not sleeping helps too. 
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My question for you this time: How do you balance your online and offline responsibilities?
Question from before: How do you find inspiration in prompts that aren't that interesting?
taliah_l replied: My usual method for sparking life into uninspiring prompts is to combine them with additional restrictions. I mean "write about a dragon" is so broad that you could sit there for days without writing anything, but if another contest happens to require a steampunk romance...well, a dragon-steampunk-romance has GOT to be interesting right? And then you have entries to two contests!
Mandy replied: Hi Sapph! Thank you for the highlight of The Steampunk Salon Poetry Contest. I enjoyed your comments and advice on sourcing prompts. It's so true that it gets harder to come up with writing ideas and prompts over time, and your suggestions for finding inspiration are good ones. Thanks again!
Magicmama replied: I once entered a contest where the prompt was atomic catfish. I ended up writing about a submarine, and named it catfish in Japanese. In Japan, they once believed that earthquakes were caused by a huge catfish under the islands, but later the word was used to mean social change as well. Sometimes tracing a word in the dictionary or in another language will trigger an idea. I find that layering ideas like this helps make my writing more interesting to me, and that makes it more interesting to read.
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Contests & Activities: December 10, 2014 Issue [#6708]
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