In a Father's Day post, I noted that I'd been waiting almost a year to put up Ernie Bushmiller's "DADDY-O!" That prompted Matt Thomas to wonder, in a comment, about how I blog. And so I'm writing this post.
I've written about the why in blog-anniversary posts from 2005 and 2008. As for the how: I jot ideas for posts in a pocket notebook (since last summer, an orange Quo Vadis Habana notebook). I usually draft longer posts in that notebook or on blank pages of my Moleskine page-a-day planner. Sometimes I use a legal pad. I usually write shorter posts in a text-editor on a MacBook.
I sometimes draft a post long before it appears, but that doesn't work well: those drafts often begin to seem stale, and I often end up deleting them unpublished. The time between writing and posting seems significant for me, and the explanation probably lies in the long gap between submission and publication in academia. (I've always felt strange seeing my writing in print well after the fact.) But I can work on a post for a long time or "plan" to write a post for any length of time and then write it, with no ill effect, or at least none that I can see. I "planned" to write something about the astonishing song "I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape" for almost two years before writing a post. Right now I'm "planning" to write a post on Hooker 'N Heat, the 1971 double-album by John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat (recorded forty years ago next May).
As a regular reader knows, I've been posting almost every day for some time. This practice is a matter not of compulsion but of pleasure. "I can quit whenever I want," and so on. My greatest happiness in Orange Crate Art is that it has made writing a pleasure, not something I have to do but what I do, an always available possibility. I love the idea of "a post" — small enough to fit in the hand, like a letter or card, but as short or long as it needs to be. Addressed, reader, to you.
