Late Again

Don’t you just hate it when that blog post you have gotten into the habit of reading first thing on a Friday morning isn’t there when you sit down with your coffee? I know that was my reaction when the newspaper I subscribed to back in the day was not waiting for me when I made my trek to the mailbox first thing. But sometimes there are struggles on the supply end of the blogger-bloggee relationship. This past week was one of those times.

I detest being late. I was raised by a mother who may never have been late to anything in her life. At least I was left with that impression. And so, when I determined years ago to have a blog post up and live at 4 a.m. Eastern time each Friday morning, by golly it was going to be up and ready. And for the most part, I have kept up my end. But alas (he said with an audible sigh) there are days.

In my former life with a desk job, my writing tasks could be stretched out all through the week. My usual approach to writing has been 1) the flash of brilliance (or what may seem like brilliance in the moment) that generates an idea; 2) a few paragraphs to get the basics down before my overactive mind moves on to something else; 3) thinking about how to develop that roughest of drafts into something with a resemblance to a theme and a flow; 4) converting those first rough paragraphs into an essay that follows my mental outline; and finally 5) one or more proofreading/editing sessions as time allows.

When I was at a computer all day, it was easy to catch those flashes of brilliance in the moment, when they were hot. My life then was all about diversions, be they emails, ringing telephones or people knocking on my door and walking in as they asked “Got a minute?”. So 5 or 10 minutes to bang out the guts of a fabulous blog post was an easy matter to squeeze into the day. The rest of the weekly writing would occur during lunch breaks, or early on weekend mornings when I have the house to myself. Saturday morning was a great time to do the heavy lifting for a post scheduled for the following Friday. The key here is that virtually none of my writing has happened on weekday evenings. I am one of those rare people who enjoys spending time with my spouse, and it is during those evenings that she has dibs on my time.

Life is different now. Because I drive for a living, it is so much harder to capture those inspirational flashes. When things are hitting on all cylinders, I can think of the idea and flesh it out mentally through the day, but all I have is my phone for doing some rudimentary typing, and then, only at certain times when I am not actively driving or otherwise working. And when I am not reading and commenting on my favorite blogs from some of you.

And because my work week now starts on Saturday morning and rungs through late afternoon on Wednesday, I have Thursday morning to pound things into finished form before my “weekend” proceeds to the other things that must be done around the house. Early Friday morning becomes, if everything is working well, the time to get a start on a post for next week.

But sometimes everything isn’t working well. Yesterday, for example, was spent wrestling with a draft that contains a good basic idea, but has been fighting me with everything it’s got, paragraph by paragraph. Then life called me away, and here it is Friday morning, when it is easier to riff on the difficulties in the process than it is to finish that draft.

Oh well, first world problems and all that. I continue in attempts to reconcile my blogging life with my working life and my non-writing leisure life. Years ago, I attended a seminar which began with a teaser promising the secret to never being late again. When the presenter got to the big reveal, he got a big smirk on his face and said “Be early.” Going back to a once-weekly schedule should help me regain my ability to be early in my writing.

And now, I will hit the “Publish” button and move on to something for next week.

35 thoughts on “Late Again”

  1. I have often wondered how comic strip writers manage to meet their daily deadlines. I figure it’s in the way that they prepare weeks ahead of time and have several weeks ahead of storylines. Some have a different theme every day, while others carry on a them for days and days.

    You sir, give us a fresh thought every week, without a rerun, which is remarkable. Maybe you should take up teaching English in your post-post retirement career. Or writing a comic strip about a lawyer become trucker. If you can draw as well as you write that is.

    Have a great day!

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    • Thanks, Lee! I know some bloggers who build up a buffer of material which is scheduled out days or weeks in advance. When I was doing the Tuesday car posts, I had the luxury of a couple of holiday weekends which allowed me to get out ahead of those a bit. But for my regular Friday post, I have always preferred the high wire lifestyle of starting from scratch a few days in advance of the deadline.

      If I retire from my current gig and start a third career, I was thinking more along the lines of either becoming a combination bum/crank or maybe a sage who dispenses valuable free advice to anyone who will (or will not) listen. 🙂

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  3. My parents, too inspired in me the phobia about always being on time. I get a physical nervousness when I’m running late – even if its not a task that involves an actual deadline. Later in life, my parents took being on time to an extreme – if we invited them for dinner at 5, they would show up before 4:30 always EARLY. My wife and I had to resort to making up phony times for them, expecting them to show up 30-45 minutes ahead of the time we suggested. While it was a pain, I guess it was better than being late all the time.

    Laughing at your idea of becoming a combination bum/crank…. In my retirement, my wife would suggest that I’ve already beaten you to that job description.

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    • My mother was one of those very early arrivers too, and we had to do the very same thing by giving her a fake target time for arrival.

      Any tips you can provide on being a good bum/crank would be appreciated!

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      • If I could attach photos I would send a recent photo the wife took of me snoring away in a Lazy Boy chair (one of 3 in our TV room at our Missouri cabin, which I mentioned in another of your posts a while ago). And we can compare it to a very similar photo of Uncle Joe Carson from Petticoat Junction at rest in his rocker on the front porch. So my first piece of advice would be to get a nice comfy chair, and practice taking long naps in the afternoon. If possible, try not to snore and/or drool while sleeping.

        Then have someone wake you up unceremoniously by dropping pans in the kitchen, and you’ll start to develop the crankiness part.

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  4. My last creative services department management job for a corporation drove me into retirement probably a little before I wanted to go. My young staff had a day to day viewpoint of corporate far different from the norm. Too many things to go into, but it was pretty obvious that as far as they were concerned about their work day, their idea of when to start the work day was considered a “suggestion”. Not only could they be 15-45 minutes late, any “corrective” interaction was met by a shrug. I came from a life-long employment system that functioned under the idea that if you weren’t 10 minutes early, you were late. No amount of explanation associated with the idea that if they weren’t there to be depended on, fast breaking advertising to respond to markets wasn’t going to get done on time. Depending on where you live, firing them would usually result in the distinct possibility that you would just hire another person the felt the same and would work the same way. The only way to get away from it would be to work in a more professional market with a salary range that would attract premium employees. Something not available to me in my last job.

    If there was any proof that people that “work from home” probably are not running on all cylinders, it’s this type of experience. I found that assigning work to be accomplished from home, is usually underestimated because of how the management has zero idea of how you’re functioning, so their expectation of volume is lower than what would be expected in an office situation. Our modern world.

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    • I don’t miss those environments at all! I had to laugh recently at one son who has people who report to him in a business. He, a millennial, was lamenting about how these younger kids have no work ethic. One intern was exhibiting the same lax ideas about when to arrive and he had to let her go after maybe the 3rd discussion about it, where he was clear that prompt start time was a requirement of the job. After he told me the story, I kidded him about his “Kids today!!” attitude. 🙂

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      • I forgot to even mention those youngsters that got to work late, then ate breakfast at their desks while texting their pals for the next 30 minutes!

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  5. Did said presenter get a knuckle sandwich for his efforts? I was tempted just by the story, and I’m a pathologically punctual person.

    On the other hand… would dictating your posts work for you? I mean, I think we’re aligned in the enjoyment of actually punching the keys (sorry, punching seems to be a theme of today’s comment); but given it’s probably against company policy to type and drive…

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    • Company policy prohibits even talking on a cell phone when driving, so I suspect that dictating while driving would be pretty much the same thing. Although I suppose that some talk to text might speed me up making some notes during some of my downtime.

      I kind of saw that presenter’s point – it is so tempting to say that I have to be somewhere at, say, 9 am, and then to leave with exactly the amount of time it will take me (in a perfect world) to arrive. I will confess that I am bad about building extra time into my drive time when I have an appointment, and traffic, parking and all kinds of other things can slow me down for 5 minutes, and thereby cause a problem. Fortunately, there are no hard time schedules in my current job so there is no pressure to be somewhere at a certain time.

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      • Well, so much for that idea… 🤔
        I have the opposite problem. I’m usually sitting in the car for 10 minutes before anything I have a schedule for.

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  6. Your challenges in making a blog post are understandable. Frankly, I’ve been quite impressed you’ve been able to so successfully keep the blog going with your new career.

    Like you, capturing the good ideas has been a challenge. While I ostensibly have an office job, my day will find me in all manner of places, often with little time for lunch. Such is life. The sad thing is I’ve lost more good ideas than I have had good ideas that get used.

    Lateness happens. Every year for my birthday my mother reminds me about being born 11 days after my due date. Naturally, she makes it sound as if she were in active labor for those 11 days, but things just happen despite our better efforts to the contrary.

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  7. You know, in a post I wrote last week on Curbside, I actually asked readers to talk about in the comments how they manage coming up with ideas and then develop them…and no one bit. I’m therefore glad to read your whole post about essentially how that works for you!

    I depend on the flash of “brilliance” too. Well, flashes at least. I try to get a few notes down and then hopefully I’ll still remember what seemed so compelling about the thought when I actually have time to sit down and write. I usually have 3 or 4 ideas hanging out like this. Marinating. For the most part, the newest ideas are the ones that get turned into posts. I have maybe 3 ideas now that have been just ideas for over a year and seem likely to stay that way forever. As Bob Newhart said in the Infinite Number of Monkeys bit, “Oh boy…I don’t think that poor devil is ever going to write anything.”

    Once I commit to writing something though, I have to pretty much get it all done in one fell swoop. That can lead to spending a full day writing a post…something that I can only manage due to the fact that most of my time is under my schedule (i.e., aside from when I’m meeting with someone or traveling, my time is my own to get things done according to deadlines that I for the most part set myself). Nevertheless, creating posts is still usually time-intensive and I absolutely could not manage to do what you do in terms of regularly generating interesting content every week.

    So if I were you, I’d be mighty darn pleased at being able to come up with good stuff so regularly. As long as that well doesn’t run dry, being late every once in a while is just fine.

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    • Your ability to get flashes of brilliance is admirable, if not enviable. Anything of mine appearing at the website you mention is a rare occurrence these days due to life, faint flickers of ideas, and losing any faint flickers. I’ve been sitting on pictures of some mighty fine cars since back in the spring (1935 Chrysler Airflow being driven from Illinois to San Francisco sound interesting?) and, well, nothing. Even the time needed to comment has been rare these days.

      Like you, most inspiration needs to be belted out in one sitting. Then spend four weeks refining and tweaking. I’m not sure how JP does it, but he keeps doing a very good job with making inspirations into something tangible.

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    • Yes, the bottom of my drafts barrel (both here and at Curbside) is a pretty grim place. Kind of like the island of misfit toys, except that Rudolph never comes to rescue any of them.

      You are kind to call my content interesting – it is a fear of mine that a day will come when my content interests nobody but me. I hope I recognize that point before I actually get there.

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  8. JP I always enjoy your posts, but I thought the twice a week posting schedule, even though totally different topics, must have been very time-consuming. You should cut yourself some slack if you have to miss a week or so. I used to worry about having something up every Thursday, but then I took two years off and when I came back I decided just try and do my best, which hasn’t been very consistent lately, but it is what it is right now. When baseball is over and the cold weather arrives, I’ll probably do better. I tried the dictation feature on Microsoft Word just to get my thoughts down, even though I type really fast and it was okay but not something I would regularly do unless I broke my wrist or something. I never ever talk on the phone while in the car, I’ve seen too many bad accidents with just a moment’s distraction.

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  9. My parents were all about being timely, just like your mom JP, so it rubbed off on me, not to mention the fact that I took the bus for decades. I caught it just around the corner from the house, so I walked up a block and the stop was right there. No driving involved. I had my routine timed well; I always took one bus before the bus that would actually get me to work on time. My bus route had to cross over the Rouge River and especially during the shipping season, April through December, if a freighter had to pass under the drawbridge, the person manning the bridge put the bridge up, sometimes way too early – perhaps if they were a newbie bridge operator? One time they lowered the bridge too soon and it damaged the freighter. I always read on the bus anyway, so that extra 20-30 minutes of reading time was appreciated, although I admit I would start glancing at my watch if it took too long.

    Have you tried using a Dictaphone handheld recorder to capture your thoughts, not while on the road per se, but maybe in between runs/loads, etc. If you use Word in Microsoft Office, you could turn on the dictaphone in Microsoft Word, play YOUR dictaphone and the words will spill out onto the screen.

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      • Yes, it was … my habits are not as stellar nowadays and I don’t put 1/4 of the effort into my appearance heading out the door now, so less time in front of the mirror should mean a timely exit, but it’s not! I have a smartphone but really don’t know how to use it and I can’t text to save my life. The keyboard is just too tiny.

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  11. I just stop by here every day and if I see something new, I stop and read it and if not, I mosey on. Honestly I don’t notice what days most people post. I am going to try to create drafts using voice-to-text typing and then editing later but life happens, sometimes a lot, too.

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  13. I totally get this, J P (as do most bloggers, no doubt). In a perfect world, my ideas germinate on a Monday, mature on a Tuesday, become a draft blog on Wednesday, and, with a little flourish of editing, publish Thursday morning at 10am ET. A total of 2-3 hours. But rarely is this the case. I’ve had weeks where I’m ready to publish the Sunday prior (albeit rarely). I’ve had others where I create the whole thing between the time I wake up on Thursday and 10am ET. Bottom line – I won’t force the issue. It feels like going through the motions when you’re publishing just to keep the weekly streak going. Come the day I’m no longer inspired to post, I’ll be satisfied to hang it up and move on to more interesting uses of my time.

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