Ok, Press Week really takes it out of me. Between Thursday and Friday, I spent 25 hours in front of my computer screen, designing the pages and laying out the text. By the time I'm done I don't want to look at the written word ever again.
I was talking to a friend at work the other day who invited me out for a drink after work which I had to decline because it was Press Week and I had to get up early. I mentioned that I don't know how editors at daily papers get their papers to press and still manage to go out for a drink, you know, ever again. "Are you kidding?" he said, "that's why they drink."
But a couple of days go by and you feel yourself starting to come out of the rhetorical coma, you get back to finding that you actually WANT to read and write again and that the mere act of putting out a community college newspaper did not, in fact, kill your motivation or your talent.
You also find, however, that you have 2000 or so unread posts in your Bloglines that you have to wade through to figure out what everyone's talking about. And this has led to some problems for me. There is a dual nature to the kinds of writing that I'm doing right now, on the paper and on the blog, and they are both a help and a hindrance to one another.
On the paper, I'm required to come up with stories ahead of time that are pertinent to our campus (in the case of a news story) or original thought for the campus (in the case of opinion or feature writing). On the blog, my writing has almost always been reactive to other people's writings or to other events that were happening with the very rare inclusion of an original idea. At the same time, the act of daily writing on the blog makes it easier to write for the paper and writing for the paper helps hone my writing style here on the blog (although I'm sure my journalism teachers would not approve of this post, journalistically speaking).
Most of the bloggers that I've read who also have careers that involve writing or publishing of some kind have expressed similar things. Blogging helps with keeping the tool sharp, but giving either one a sense of priority sort of hurts the other one.
So, I'm trying to find the new balance for it all. During the time that I laid off blogging, I not only missed it but I also felt my, I dunno, sharpness fade a bit in my writing. I've said it before, but this blog is one of the biggest reason why I went back to school and why I wanted it to be in journalism. So far, it has all seemed to be a good fit, but I don't want to abandon the blog either. I'm just going to have to find a new way of keeping both types of writing vibrant.
All of this is simply to say that, if the blog seems a bit uneven at times, that is why.
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