Until The Page Bleeds Red

Currently I am sitting at the fourth computer I have worked at today, and I just got back from moving my car from the overflow parking lot here on my campus. I have been on campus since 9:30 a.m. and I am pretty sure I am not going to leave here until around two in the morning tomorrow.

I don't blame the time on my colleagues, we have been working as hard as we can, I blame it on Today's schedule and the inability of writers to start stories before the day they are due. Don't get me wrong, I like to procrastinate, I mean, that is what my blog is named after, but starting a story at 7 p.m. when it was due at 4 is unacceptable.

I started some stories, the day they were due, when I was a staff writer. But I did it in the morning before I came to school, and most of the time, had more than half of it done before my editors asked how far along I was.

I wouldn't care if the writing was clean, but our managing and executive editors, not to mention our section editors, have been marking up the pages with correction ink in an attempt to help our writers improve.

What that translates into is, slower returns of stories to the writers, longer reviewing of editing marks and an overall longer process of finishing a paper.

The process is coming along and things have drastically improved since the 4 a.m. night ... I mean morning. Other than the writing side of the paper, everything else seems to be going fine. The editors really have gotten the hang of their pages and are catching some of my mistakes. Yes I do make them. It is good to know that, in a couple of weeks, everything will hopefully have become streamlined and the process will yield an earlier return-home time. Possibly on the same day as we begin creating it.