Last night before I went to bed, I did my nightly Internet checklist.  I check email, comments, RSS subscriptions of my MUST read blogs, and the various pay per sites I’m signed up with; there’s almost never an subject that I feel good about taking on, but you never know.

Low and behold, on PayPerPost, they were paying $50 to write about roller-coasters.  I’m a roller-coaster nut, but Desty Online isn’t about roller-coasters, so I didn’t think much about it.  After scanning the list, nothing on my radar, but something made me come back to the roller-coaster gig.  I don’t know what it was, the roller-coaster subject, or the fact that they were paying $50 for the article (almost enough for my 1st paid review I’m eyeing), but I clicked to check it out.  Turns out that it wasn’t about roller-coasters at all, but PayPerPost paying for articles about a change in their business plan and/or structure.

The article was huge, a blog entry on their blog I guess.  After scanning it, I liked what I saw, so I figured that I would reserve a spot.  It was about PayPostPost’s business, and not only did it fit in with my subject area, but I was getting interested in the article itself.  Sadly, all of the spots had been reserved, so no write up for me.

As I was drifting off to sleep, I started to think about the various articles that I had ideas for, or started to write but never got posted.

• The Million Dollar Man Article — If you remember back in the 80’s, the World Wrestling Federation had a wrestler called the Million Dollar Man.  His big thing was that everyone had their price, and he’d pay it to get what he wanted.  He’d have people come up and do silly or humiliating tasks for his amusement, and pay them.  “Everyone has a price for the Million Dollar Man!”  After thinking about it, I think that everyone does have a price, somewhere; it’s all a matter of what they want you to do and how much are they going to pay.  I heard a joke back in the 90’s about how Ross Perot went to Kathy Ireland and offered her $20 million dollars if she’d sleep with him.  “Sure,” she replied.  “Ok, how about only $20 to sleep with me,” Ross negotiated.  “I’m insulted!” Kathy stormed, “what type of girl do you think I am??”  Ross smiled, “We’ve already established what type of girl you are, now we’re just haggling over the price.”  I stepped back from writing the article because alot of people are in denial about being for sale.  My price you ask,  $775,000; mind you it depends on what the task is.
• Google = The New Dark Lord of the Sith? — A few years ago, heck, they still might think this, but Vice President Dick Cheney was compared to the Sith from the hugely popular Star Wars films.  With Google constantly changing standards and requirements for the hoops blogs have to jump through to get indexed, stay indexed, and comply with SEO, I had a thought.  This was back during the Project: I, Blogger series and I thought an article discussing Google and their ever changing standards would be a great addition.  As I sat down to write it, my business side chipped in that pointed out that no one was putting a gun to bloggers’ heads to force them to comply with Google.  With my main argument out the door, the rest of the article fell apart.
• Technorati Tag Line — In the earlier days of Desty Online, in trying to find my voice, I would skim through Technorati and scan the popular tag lines and subjects.  I don’t remember the subject, but I do remember that I wrote the entire article because the subject was popular.  While proofing the article, I couldn’t stand it.  Ever since high school, my standard when writing was that to have an excellent paper (article, post, whatever really), it had to be entertaining.  While not exactly funny or anything like that, it had to have a good flow and not make you stop reading in the middle because you couldn’t stand it.  I don’t know if all my articles follow that standard today, but I knew that popularity driven article was horrible and I couldn’t read it all the way through.  I sat on it for a few hours, reading and rereading it, trying to fix it, but no luck.  I trashed it.

Do you have any articles that you almost wrote but never got off the ground?

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