I’m baaaaaack!
I know, I know. It’s been forever since I last wrote anything. I told you guys I wouldn’t quit writing but I did for a little while there and for that, I am sorry.
But now I’m back so no more need to feel sad!
As many of you know, I left The Odyssey in a very abrupt way with little to no warning. My Twitter followers were the only ones to receive any kind of warning and that was like a 20 minute warning, max. If you’re curious to know why, you’re about to find out.
It’s VERY easy to start writing for The Odyssey. That has it’s ups and downs. I, by no means, have any kind of impressive feats that would make someone think, “Hey, we should hire this girl as a writer!” so that was really awesome when I was. But the downside to this is the writers there are unpaid (except when your article wins article of the week, in which case you get $20). I just felt like that was rather unfair for anyone with a ridiculous amount of shares every week. Imagine how much money they make off of ads just for the writer to receive none of that. It was recently published that The Odyssey is a 25 MILLION dollar company. And they make that much money off of writers and first level editors they don’t even pay!
The place you do all of your writing is called Muse. It’s where you can see all of your articles you’ve ever published and can see where your most recent article is in editing. It was also the single greatest headache of my life for the few months I was writing on that platform. Muse is so poorly run, I couldn’t handle it much longer. You’d think they would do something that would make their unpaid writers’ lives a little easier with that 25 million they’ve got laying around.
We were on a strike system that made me feel like I was in kindergarten again. If you missed your deadline, even by 3 minutes, you were given a strike. Three strikes and, you guessed it, you’re out. I felt like this was the worst possible way to get your writers’ best work. I found myself publishing the worst articles I’ve ever written, just to meet a deadline. You also had to share your article by Wednesday night or else you would get a strike.
The editors would often edit my work changing wording around just assuming they knew what I meant. Half the time, I had sentences in my articles that didn’t even sound like my writing anymore. Not only did they edit my articles past being able to recognize my writing, they also never got my work edited on time for publishing.
One time, my article was still in editing by Tuesday. Tuesday night it was published, but edited so much so that you couldn’t even recognize my writing. My editors took it upon themselves to correct what they thought to be bad wording and change it to something that didn’t even mean the same thing I originally said. I had to email the last editor that night to tell her it needed to be corrected before I would share it. She emailed back the next morning stating she would change it. I received another email 2 minutes later from her threatening to give me a strike if I didn’t share by midnight. Which I found hilarious considering she was supposed to have my article published by Monday.
I’m sure other chapters of The Odyssey are great. I have friends at other schools that love it but my editors made it a nightmare. I couldn’t stand putting work out for it to either be changed more than it should have ever been, for it to not be published on time, or for it not to be my best work and I had submitted it just to avoid getting yelled at (through email of course).
I had to take a break from it all. I’m back now and I have the freedom to write whatever I want and when I want. So get ready because it’s about to get real.
Dream Big and Achieve 