February wasn’t exactly the best month for me this year, at least as far as writing is concerned.
Those who enjoy my humor column on a regular basis probably noticed that over the last 5 weeks, it’s been anything but regular, and sure, there was that whole bout with bronchitis that I had to work through at the beginning, but to me it’s still unacceptable because if I had been working ahead of schedule like I should, it wouldn’t have been more than a blip in a blog post and everything would’ve continued to run as usual while I withered away to nothing in bed…
Anyways, I’m trying my best to get everything back on track now, as of tonight I’ve got two on-time columns under my belt for March, and things are starting to look up for the boy. More importantly, through all of the chaos I’ve been trying to figure out how to make things easier for myself going forward, and although I know it sounds stupid, I’m going to spell it out anyways for the sake of saying it … it’s better to get my work done earlier!!!
Now my humor column normally goes up on Fridays. Unfortunately, I have a horrible habit of still pounding away at the keyboard late into the wee hours of the night on Thursdays, if I don’t just give up and admit that it’s going to be late, that is. It’s a bad process, and I’ll openly admit that because it’s also excrutiating in that I typically spend more time pounding my own head into the keyboard than actually using my fingers to make words at that point.
But as for my last two here in March, I actually did a lot better and it’s something that I really want to try and stick to going forward – most of my writing actually got done the previous weekend. I’m not sure if it was more pre-writing that lead to an easier flow or just less stress from not having a deadline looming over my head, but not waiting until Thursday night has been a godsend to making my life a little easier, and on top of that I enjoyed the writing more and frankly, I think that they’ve been a little bit funnier, too! It’s nice not having to settle for one line because you’re just flat out of time, as opposed to having a few days to mull over the final copy in your head before it goes out for the world to see…
It’s definitely one of those things that I want to try to start doing more consistently, not only for the short term to make the writing process easier, but also to make the long term less stressful when I start adding more and more projects that are going to require regular writing on a weekly or even more frequent basis. Maybe it sounds a little bizarre that 10 years in I haven’t managed to figure this out already, but regardless, hopefully I can learn from it and both the readers’ AND the writer’s experience will be better off because of it!