
My, how time has flown. Has it been a week already?
No, obviously not. But I am trying to keep to the schedule of a weekly accounting on Saturday or Sunday, so here it is.
Deadlines are important. I learned that through my journalism career, facing a weekly Thursday due date for my “Living Here” Sunday column. I didn’t always make it, forcing me to run either a “Best of” from the archives or a sheepish apology the next week. Both are bad practice.
Truly clever columnists like my former coworker Tracey O’Shaughnessy, whose “Reflections” still are a staple of The Sunday Republican, never have this problem. She would write two or three weeks in advance and always have a few tucked away. Many weeks she would have several to choose from if something was breaking that would make one more timely than the rest.
I know because I was her editor for about a year. I should have learned from a master.
I’m doing the next best thing, perhaps. I’m writing and scheduling posts to this blog in advance, so they will be timely. The Week in Review pieces won’t work in that format, so I do them when I can.
This week, my sad (or perhaps inspirational) story of the computer crash from last week’s Week in Review brought a frustrated Facebook comment from my computer consultant. “CLOUD STORAGE AND/OR BACKUP!!!!!!!! Aiiaiaiiaiaiagggghhhhh!! ” he wrote. Actually, I do both. I was only out of commission because of some password recovery problems.
My post on “The Season with No Name” brought another Facebook comment from our daughter in Vermont, who said it’s called “Stick Season” and even has a song. I know that Vermont has at least six seasons: Winter, Mud, Spring, Summer, Fall, Mud. If you include Sap Time, Slush, and a few others, you might get as many as a dozen.
Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on a long and detailed post about the patents that led up to the creation of Bubble Wrap. If that sounds boring, consider this: Swiss inventor Marc A. Chavannes was working for years on something that could have been valuable to the Nazis if they could get it. He escaped from Europe shortly before the invasion of Poland and came to the U.S. via Canada in 1939.
I’ve also been able to get back to work on “Harry Houdini and the Witch of Beacon Hill.” I’m giving it a read-through as I lead up to the chapter where I left off.
Until next time …
In case you missed it …
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Budding Writer, 1978: ‘I Do Care’
Reading Time: < 1 minutes As a writer, I should care more about what other people think and less about what they think of me.
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Journeyman Journalist: Bridging the gap
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes the hats of journalist and fiction writer can overlap. Covering a local disaster led to ideas for a short story.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: Settling in
Reading Time: 2 minutes With a brown-and-yellow bathroom theme, I was no interior decorator. And that Woody Allen poster was a bad role model for a writer.