Rewriting

Scraping the Barrel

I admit it. I’ve been recycling pieces. Am I bad?

Philip Ogley
All About M
Published in
3 min readOct 1, 2024

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Some men and some barrels
Some writers looking for ideas (Wiki Comms)

I’ve been writing consistently on here for nearly four years and I never thought I would stop. There was always something to write about. Each morning I would add another title or idea to my growing list of drafts. And when I got to the end of the drafts, another idea would pop into my head just when I needed it.

Then September struck and since then I’ve been struggling. My last six pieces have all been rehashes of pieces I wrote in 2021.

For example, my piece The Dead Art of Letter Writing was written in May 2021. Likewise my piece When Did Technology Become So Boring I wrote in January 2021.

No one noticed. I had no readers back then so why would they.

Therefore, it seemed perfectly logical to take a few old ideas, spruce them up a bit, and republish them. There is nothing wrong with that. The pieces belong to me, so I can do what I want with them.

But it’s lazy. It’s like rewriting a novel then republishing it under a different title. A pitiful attempt to cash in on reader loyalty.

That wasn’t my intent. My aim was to approach a piece from a different angle and improve it. Make it more engaging.

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