A WEEK IN

It’s Sunday the 15th of January, 2006, as I write this. I just realized I haven’t sent my invoice to Colorado. They like to get it a couple of days before the end of the pay period, so that’s one sure sign that doing this blog is impacting my life.
Yes, it’s been a week of blogging, and I now see why these things exist. As a writer, I was used to the delayed high of firing something off: “Oh, you liked it but you want me to switch graph 3 with graph 8 and make the whole thing funnier but with more rage? Uh, I’ll get right on that.”
With blogs, you make your drafts but then it goes out there. After a while you’ve cleared the desk in your mind, and you are writing in a new zone. There’s a reason “blog” and “unclog” rhyme. This is the beauty of the blogging experience. I’m living in the post-writing state of mild euphoria, that I would only get before, when the paper hit the streets.
Here is one crucial point: I have made huge gaffes in columns, spelling errors in names that nobody caught. Often – but not always – it was stuff the copy editors would have no way of checking. I’d fact check them with the computer and get all 517 websites that also had the name spelled wrong. If you search for Senator Chuck Nagel you get 1,590 hits on Yahoo. If you search for Senator Chuck Hagel you get 590,000.
There is nothing like coming out of your humble home in the morning, looking down the street, and seeing Tribunes – when they used to be home delivered to entire neighborhoods - laying there with a mistake you made. Or something stupid you wished you’d thought through more. Should I run down the street correcting each individual paper, before the people get up?
And that’s only the beginning: I have screwed up on a global scale. Remember when Senator Jeffords, (what is it about these damn senators?), became an independent, flipping the balance of power in the Senate?
Well, I had frankly never heard of him and the story I was reading identified him from New Hampshire, instead of Vermont, so I was treated to the spectacle of Jay Leno, apologizing for getting “his” facts wrong. This was not an immediate problem because most people the night before had not heard about Jeffords, either. However when the time came to pick the next reruns, everybody had been exposed to the Senate story for days, so it might have been enough to put the entire hour into the trash can, rather than rerun my mistake. A mistake broadcast in over 70 countries around the world.
With a blog, if you see something funky, maybe just a rhythm, or a word repeated too close together, you can GO BACK AND FIX THE DAMN THING! This is the single greatest part of the blogging experience.
Now, I have been known to do some self-promoting in my time. Folks, I’m a Portland freelancer. I have to make some sort of impact! Nobody knocked on my door and said, “We heard you can write.” The reason I was in Jonathan Nicholas’s column with my 500th Leno joke was simple: Because I called Jonathan Nicholas.
This need to promote might even take the form of writing some deliberately controversial blog posts just to stir things up. You get that, don’t you?
I thought the first week went okay. I think I’m in it for the long haul. It might make the other writing projects I do easier, rather than harder.
So I close this assessment, with my wife’s comment. Her humorous comments are one of the reasons why I love her, by the way. She asked me how many times people had visited my new blog site and at that moment, it was around 370. She asked, “Are you going to call Jonathan Nicholas when you hit 500?”