Blog Posting

It's been almost 2 weeks since the last blog post. A significant break after more than 12 months of publishing a post every day. Why? Just ran out of steam. There was lots to do outside and allocating writing time became secondary.

Normally, the blog would be written and edited over breakfast coffee but this takes a couple of hours. As well as reading and correcting several times, the preview feature is used right at the end to read and edit one final time. Something about seeing the post in the form it will be published that forces a better editing to transpire. The preview always picks up a few errors in wording or forces a grammatical change. Not to say it is perfect every time because time constraints push to end the screen time.

The goal to publish daily came about after reading/hearing an article on writing to deadlines. Journalists hone their writing skills via endless articles written to a short deadline. That was an encouragement to write as often as possible in an endeavour to improve skills. They have the benefit of an editor who corrects and modifies or chooses not to publish but the name of the game is quantity. The more articles written the greater the improvement in quality is the theory. The shorter the deadline the more natural the writing style and so on.

Well there is no independent editor to scan the articles, offer criticism, add improvements or drop the result into the trash can. So improvement remains unmeasured. There hasn't been a back tracking to review earlier writing to compare style changes but that seems like a good task to schedule, just not this morning.

The break in writing has resulted in a backlog of updates.

• The meat curing project produced some great information and results
• There is an update on the long long task of growing mushrooms with some success.
• The recycling of failed silage has continued unabated with actual tons used to both make composts and mulch nearly 200 metres of wine grapes.
• The series on winemaking still has a long way to go. It became a bigger task than first envisaged but a wonderful way to review all that has been learnt about wine taking. The challenge has been to put the information into logical and easily understandable sequence.

Well at least there is no shortage of topics.