Some ideas to help those who have to be on hiatus

Howdy, y'all!

Those of us who come here regularly have noticed something about activity on the site. We currently have a grand total of five (that's right, five) members who can be considered Active. By this, I mean that these individuals check in on a nearly daily basis AND POST as often as their characters are free to post. These Active Members include our lovely admins and two average-Joe RPers. Half of our members are on hiatus due to RL issues, and the remaining members have not posted in the Vacation/Leave thread to be placed in the hiatus category. And all those other accounts that make you scroll down in the Members listing? Those are NPC accounts for the staff of Seven Moons.

Look, our Active Members completely understand why you're on hiatus, ladies (and rogue gentleman). Life swallows us all sometimes, and Internet can be finicky. However, that doesn't mean you should abstain from posting on those occasions when you can pop on and say hullo to us. There are some perfectly good ways to keep up with your posts while on Hiatus...Take it from a chronically absent member of the forum who is still Active for posts!

Idea 1: Use your mobile devices* to plot your post ahead of time! This is my personal favorite, and it has worked for other members who spend a ton of time on Hiatus, like our recently-returned Tsukiyoko. What we do is make a copy of the last post before ours and brainstorm our response during our free time, whether that be breaks during work or time between classes. That way, by the time we are able to log back in, all that's left to do is type and post, no thinking required. ((This post? Yeah, totally typed on my iPod while my patient ate his late night snack.))

Idea 2: Whenever you have a totally off-the-wall thought about one of your characters, tell one of our members about it. Most of us can contact at least one other member outside of the forums, and I can't tell you how many times I've amused, confused and annoyed the other members here with random thoughts I had about a character. It gets the creative juices flowing and gives you some ideas to how certain types of behaviour will be received by our members and their characters. Believe it or not, this has helped me BIG TIME on character development and inspiration for my posts.

If you have any other ideas, feel free to share them. We miss you, Hiatus checker-inners! Please, find a way to post during the half-hour per week you're able to be online!


_{*If you don't have a smartphone or other mobile device with Internet access, you can print off a copy of the last post and simply write on the back of the page.}

These are great ideas, Beth. Thank you for sharing!