There are reasons I don’t tend to go back to my blog posts after they’ve been published. At least, not for a year or so. I’m highly critical of my own work, and going back through old posts a few weeks after they go live almost always results in a facepalming of “I should have arranged this thought on its own post” or “Really, that aside isn’t nearly as funny as it seemed at 2AM, why did I feel the need to keep it?” before culminating in a very high school-ish meltdown quelled with blanket forts, bunny photos, and McVitie’s Digestive biscuits.
Part of the issue deals with timing. The blog doesn’t take near as high a priority as the fiction series or getting the contributor posts edited each week, and as they are weekly snapshots of whatever work-ish related thoughts are percolating in my brain, it’s sometimes the zero hour before they get finished. At any given point, I’ll have an average of five blog posts in various states of completion sitting in my working folder to be added to or completed as the muse inspires; however, the juggle of the rest of my workload and prioritization of projects means that unlike every other piece that posts to the front page, the blog posts rarely get the once-over for feedback before going live. What you read here are, essentially, my thoughts in their original form.
Even the fan-fiction series, of which no one on staff wants to act as editor because they want to be surprised by the end result, gets mostly checked over ahead of time as various staff and community members are called upon for questions and checking in certain sections. Part of the reason I always refer to it as the RCM series isn’t because the characters are based on a mix of the community members’ Internet personas and real-life personalities (though they are), but rather because that project is a group activity. I put it on paper, but so much of the plot and jokes and even dialogue are driven from group conversations, in particular with Killer, Hax, Vampy, Bio, and Lyserg, that I’d be remiss not to give the proper creative credit they’re due. And while it’s exceptionally rare for one person to proof an entire chapter prior to publication, every scene usually has at least one person keyed in to what’s happening and they’ll give feedback for that particular part. So I mean it when I say it’s our story; I’m just the one controlling the keyboard.
The blog, however, is a different story. Given its purpose, in a way I guess it makes sense that those missives come out raw and imperfect. If a random thought appears in the middle of an argument, that’s because it’s just how my mind works. Sure, that thought might be better on its own, but my brain doesn’t usually wait for a nice clean pause in the conversation to pop in a connected example. People laud my organizational skills all the time, but really those are just mechanisms to bring some semblance of order to the disjointed thoughts racing through my mind long enough that I can continue to function as a normal(ish) human being. I’ve said before that it takes a lot of work to make something look effortless, and if the goal for the blog is to show that work, it stands to reason that when I re-read the posts I’ll find a half a dozen things in each entry that I’ll want to change, cringing because I promised not to.
And because, let’s face it, I’ve got more things to work on right now. I’ll catch it later in the essay compilations.
For now, it will suffice to brew a cup of tea, keep calm, and write on.
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