Hello, dear reader! As you can see, this blog is a weekly blog: a new post1 goes up every Tuesday2 (per my time zone), and so, just for shiggles, I thought I'd share with you a little bit of what it's like here behind the Stacks3 every week.
Let's start with Tuesday (aka pub day):
二｜Tuesday: Furiously writing, editing, proofreading, and — to borrow4 a term from software development — "devops"ing (that is, doing all the technical, infrastructural, and engineering stuff behind the scenes that results in a deliverable: in this case, a published blog post) — until I finally hit the big, scary Publish button (usually just under the wire of my hard midnight deadline5 '^^).
三｜Wednesday: Day off from blogging — mostly because I'm just completely wiped out from doing so much of it the day before. '^^
四｜Thursday: Starting to think about what to post for the following Tuesday. If I have even just the seed of an idea, I start typing.
五～日｜Friday–Sunday: Writing, rewriting, cutting, some more writing, some more cutting, even more rewriting. . . .
一｜Monday: More writing and rewriting and re-rewriting . . . until I finally have to acknowledge that what I have been working on all week is not going to be ready by the next day. I then flail around looking for something else to prepare in time. If I'm lucky, I think of something that would work as a bonus post (for Thursday — well, for a Thursday), work on that for an unnecessary number of hours (because of course I do) until it's not actually ready (because of course it's not) — and then flail around some more trying to figure out what to post for the much more urgent deadline of the following day. *sighs*
. . . And we're back to Tuesday's last-minute madness. (I would like to think of it as "controlled chaos", but that is putting it perhaps a tad too optimistically. '^^)
A natural consequence of this spectacularly inefficient process6 is that I end up with a lot of unfinished irons in the fire, so to speak. That is to say, I have a lot of posts at various stages of incomplete. '^^
So, returning to the original question of what happens here at the Stacks from week to week?
Answer:
Rather a lot of writing that will not be published on any particular date — if at all —, and rather little writing that will be published for its particular deadline.
🤦🏻♀️
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A new post just means a heretofore unpublished post here at the Stacks. It can include something previously published (i.e., from the Archives) provided that it has significantly revised (and probably updated) material, by the way. Since part of the point of keeping a blog, for me, anyway, is to have some external accountability architecture to keep me writing regularly, the important thing is that the (main) weekly post is something I've put some significant work into, not that its starting material has never been unleashed upon a poor unsuspecting public. ↩
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Bonus posts, of whatever flavour, when they happen — if they happen —, go up on Thursdays for the most part. ↩
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I'm only talking about what I do with this blog, all of which is worked on around and in between many other commitments, of course — because I am not a full-time blogger (nor do I want to be). ↩
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And butcher through some rather egregious noun-verbifying. XD ↩
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I have a soft deadline of noon — which I almost never make. '>_< ↩
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I have a suspicion that becoming a bona fide journalist with some bona fide meet-your-deadlines-or-lose-your-job stakes would probably beat some efficiency into me. ↩