Scheduling Announcement

 I first posted to this blog on August 17, 2008. George W. Bush was president. The Sole Heir was a rising high school senior. The number one film at the box office was Tropic Thunder. The Los Angeles Angels, led by Vladimir Guerrero Sr. and managed by Mike Scioscia, had the best record in baseball.

This is the 1,175^th post. There have been over one million views and 1600 comments; I am grateful for each and every one. In all that time I have only had to delete a small handful of comments (not including spam) because they were disrespectful of another commenter or wholly off topic.

I’ve kept it going because I enjoy writing the posts. I made a conscious decision several years ago to limit all posts to the traditional newspaper column length of 600 – 800 words out of respect for my readers’ time. (Interviews often run longer, as I do not limit what my guests say. The blog is a great way for me to work things out in my head by writing them down. The self-imposed word limit is helpful to my editing skills in general. There is no downside to this blog for me.

Hold that thought.

I retired from my day job on December 31, 2020. The time retirement made available to me to do whatever I wanted bumped into how tightly organized my days had to be when I was working 40 or more hours a week until I realized a while back that I didn’t have much more ‘free’ time now than I did five years ago. Sure, I got to pick how the day was filled, but the day was filled. I found myself fighting for time to do what I wanted to do for fun amid the time spent doing the things I felt I should be doing or needed to do.

That’s not the point of retirement.

I dedicated myself to drop a post every Friday come hell or high water. I wrote post in advance to cover weeks I’d be away. I worked ahead in general in case I became busier than expected. As an example, I’m drafting this post on April 7 for posting April 18. This is the least lead time I’ve had in weeks.

There are two problems with that. Keeping to such a strict schedule allows me to guarantee the most recent post – especially interviews – will live at the top of the page for a full week. That’s nice, but it also means there are topics that come up on social media or at a conference that I don’t get to until the iron has cooled considerably and the world has moved on.

The other problem with that kind of schedule is that it places the cart before the horse. The blog drives my schedule when I should be driving its. In short, it’s become like a job. True, it’s a job I enjoy, and it’s not like I’m spending forty hours a week doing it, but the whole point of retirement is to do what I want to do when I want to do it.

Something had to give.

So this will be the last regularly scheduled weekly post. I can’t say yet whether I’ll post more or less often, only that I’ll post when I feel I have something worthwhile to say. Any writer friends who’d like to do an interview or guest post, you’re always welcome; you know where to find me. I’ll still do the conference summaries and quarterly roundups of my favorite reads. The only thing that will change is the regularity of posting every Friday.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed, commented, or read this page over the past seventeen years. I’d probably write it if no one read it, but the validation I receive here when I see people do read it, and the comments left here and in other social media are more than gratifying. I’m a better writer because of it, and probably a better person for making myself look at things in more detail. I hope some of what I’ve said here about writing has had a positive effect, maybe taught a newer writer a thing or two.

I’ll be back soon. Just probably not next Friday. I’ll be at the Malice Domestic conference and don’t intend to queue anything in advance.