I generally write my blog posts a day ahead of time and then publish them first thing in the morning when I get up.

This has the advantage of giving me time to proofread them a few times; usually the final proof is just before I go to bed.

But it also gives me time to polish the writing a little, and more important, very often my first thoughts are not my best thoughts. After I’ve written the first draft, I usually have second or third thoughts, either toning down a much too frankly expressed opinion, or more often, coming up with a better idea or better way of phrasing something.

I had the exact opposite problem with the Steve Sattazahn post that I wrote a few days ago.

I wanted to put it out there as quickly as possible, so I wrote it on the fly, right after hearing the news of Steve’s passing, and after giving it a cursory proofing, I published it.

And sent out the link.

And then the link got propagated to dozens of folks who might have been interested in Steve, and all of a sudden lots of folks were hitting it.

Then I re-read it.

And I noticed two things.

It was written in a slightly stilted fashion compared to what it might have been if I had had a chance to proofread it a couple more times. Well, OK. It was after all a hastily written remembrance of Steve.

But also, I remembered something else that I would have liked to have added to the piece, something that would have lightened it up just a little bit. I could have even added a short audio tape recording.

Should I edit the piece to add it in?

But so many folks had already read it.

Should I write another piece just to include that one little incident?

Naw, the extra bit wasn’t that good. It would have fit right into the original post but it wasn’t good enough to worry about now. I’ll save it, and perhaps it might find its way into some future post dealing with my Elco High School memories.

So that’s why I try to write my posts ahead to time. Sometimes, especially when I’m working on a long form, multi-part piece, I try to have a bunch of posts written ahead of time, so I can concentrate to the longer piece.

But speaking of Steve Satazzahn, his obituary has finally been published and I added it to the post about him.