Saturday, July 27, 2013

Doesn't Add Up


Some days, I think my blog posts are really long. Then I compare them to The Simple Dollar, Jen Hatmaker, Penelope Trunk, or (if I'm desperate, the fallen-from-grace-since-JD-left) Get Rich Slowly, and I realize that my posts are actually rather short.

They just happen to take a long time.

I get an idea, write it out, fine tune it, then set it aside. Then I re-write the introduction, which means I break the joke set-ups and have to re-build the whole thing. When I think it's almost good enough to post, I have my wife read it. Her reaction (or lack thereof) makes me remove the lame jokes1 and fine tune the rest, word smith, and generally trim. At this point it would be funny to say "and then I re-write it all over again," but I don't, because now it's brilliant and it makes my wife laugh. It's also very different from my rough draft. From the first draft to the final, I probably keep about 70% of my ideas and 35% of my wording.

I take all this time because I hate the idea of putting something out there that can be criticized legitimately2.

Not to mention that the whole world would fall apart if somebody left a joke in the comments that was funnier than my blog. True, it's not much of a risk for a blog that averages just under one comment per post, but someday I'll be famous and people will go back and read my archives and leave comments, and I need to be funnier today than the iPhone's Auto-Troll app will be twenty years from now3.

I didn't do all of that this time. This took about 45 minutes of time that I was supposed to spend doing something else. So, enjoy at your own risk.


1 Yes, the jokes you see all cleared that hurdle.
2 I define legitimate criticisms as the ones that make me feel bad.
3 You know this is going to be one of the first commercial uses of Artificial Intelligence capable of real human conversation.

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