Blogging with a delay

· mumblings ·

I found it unexpectedly hard to blog while I was in the US. I had thought that it might be difficult to write about my experiences after the fact, as weblogs (well, mine anyway) are meant to be spontaneous things. So I made sure that I actually wrote my posts on the day that they occurred to me. What I hadn't anticipated was that it would matter if I didn't publish the entry immediately -- that was completely unexpected.

I'm still not sure why it matters. I think that it's something to do with the fact that -- in the usual course of weblogging -- your thoughts and opinions surface, you write them down, and then you publish them. From that point on, they are more or less out of your control: for better or worse, they are released into the world and you must accept what follows. If you don't publish immediately, creeping editorial doubts (the enemy of creative writing) surface. You start to tinker and fiddle, and before you know it, you've killed anything fresh and lively that they might have contained. For me, the weblogging mechanism seems to be an integral part of the writing process.