Monday morning. It’s not really Monday for me. This is posting on Monday, but I’m writing it on Thursday the week before. That’s how things work in the newspaper industry. Articles are written days before they “go to press.”  I want to work how a newspaper writer would work. I want to work how a magazine writer would work. Keep ahead. Write days ahead so that you never get behind. “Stop the presses” just doesn’t happen in real life, especially for articles that go in the Lifestyles section. If you miss your deadline, you just miss an opportunity to show up in print. There is no room for delay or procrastination. I don’t have to be perfect, but I do have to be on time.

Intellectually, I feel like I should treat this blog like a newspaper writer, but there is another gut feeling that bothers me sometimes. Instinctively, I realize that the Internet is a completely different media than print. It is so easy to “go to press.” Why should I treat my weblog like a newspaper when it is so clearly NOT a newspaper?

When Kristen was in the hospital, my prewritten entries seemed so empty and silly. I posted small notes saying that our family was in crisis, which seemed so much more real than the prewritten entries that I had written days before I knew that we were going to be in crisis. Of course, I didn’t worry about the blog. I knew that I had a few days of entries to hold me through the worst of it. I didn’t disappear off the face of the earth because I write days ahead. Which is better? Man, I don’t know.

I tend to write in bursts, writing a couple of entries one day and nothing the next. I mostly write Monday through Friday and rest on the weekends. I don’t like to get more than three or four days ahead because then when I want to talk about something cool like Janet Jackson’s right breast, it ends up posting days after I was so excited about it. This schedule is just arbitrary, actually. I could set up a different schedule where I write every single day. Then the time that it was posted would be the time that it was written. I could work well either way, but right now I’ve been working in bursts. Which is better? I just don’t know.

What about if I died? My entries would show up posthumously like clockwork until we finally reached the final entry of my life. How do I feel about that? On one hand, I hate it because the silly things I had written would be haunting my blog after my final curtain. On the other hand, I like it because I would be able to speak from the grave. A part of me would live on beyond death. It would be a short-lived legacy, but that’s better than most people have. Yeah, maybe the newspaper method is better. I may never have a genetic legacy, but I can at least have a written one.