LEARNING TO SAY "MAYBE LATER"

posted by James Reel

    When bloggers blog about being too busy to blog, I wonder why they didn’t take the time instead to blog about something other than not blogging. But now I understand; I feel that I owe you an explanation of why my blogging is so spotty these days. (Sorry; that sounds like a medical problem.)
    The trouble is, I’ve been busy. My work at KUAT constitutes only about 45 percent of my income; the rest flows from my work with the printed word. As the Tucson Weekly’s arts editor, every week I write one or two articles (mostly reviews of plays) and do light editing on one or two other stories. I contribute 1,000 words a week to the All Music Guide (mini-bios of composers, and program notes on compositions). I’m billed as a “contributing editor” to Strings magazine, which means I have one or two or three or maybe even four articles plus a couple of CD reviews in every issue of that monthly magazine. I write longer reviews and features for the bimonthly Fanfare magazine. Once or twice a month I do a couple of hours of proofreading for Madden, the company that puts out glossy magazines and visitor publications like Tucson Guide. About once a month I proofread and sometimes index a book for Rio Nuevo, a local publisher of books of regional interest. And during the downtime from all this, I write for other publications.
    I never have to pitch story ideas to editors. At the Weekly, I do whatever I want. Otherwise, editors e-mail me or call me with assignments. I’m not in prestigious magazines like the New Yorker (I wonder why they never call), but it’s an easy and reasonably lucrative life, and laziness and greed are my two strongest motivating forces. This may be the only profession that makes them compatible.
    Last month, the assignments started piling up. It happened around the time I was appearing in a short-run play at Invisible Theatre, essentially portraying myself as a heckler in Susan Claassen’s A Conversation with Edith Head. I had maybe 30 lines scattered through the show, but rehearsals and performances kept punching holes in my schedule for a week, and I never quite regained my equilibrium. By the beginning of this month, I had a pile of assignments that I really needed to finish off, but were showing no signs of coming to completion. I’d already done the research and interviews for several pieces, but hadn’t found the right time to sit down and write the articles. (Most of these things I can toss off in no more than two hours, once the interviews are done, so it isn’t as if I have to struggle with the muse for days on end.)
    Finally, last weekend, I sorted out my schedule and figured I could easily finish off several pieces already in the works this week, pull together by the end of the month/year two or three other articles they’ve been waiting for at Strings, make substantial progress on a book about the Navajo reservation I’m doing some heavy editorial work on for Rio Nuevo, fulfill all my usual weekly commitments, and start fresh in January with a couple of big pieces on the Bach cello suites and violinist Kyoko Takezawa. After devoting most of Saturday to household stuff, all I’d have to do on Sunday would be skip the concert being presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (of which I’m vice president), stay home, polish off a piece for Strings on adding pizzazz to your viola playing, complete a potential February cover article for Stage Directions on the new Mesa Arts Center (that’s where I was last Wednesday, instead of on the air), and write two theater reviews for the Weekly. Which I did.
    But then I got a call from the editor of Fanfare, who announced that the magazine’s Webmaster had just died; would I take over the job? OK, fine, even though that means learning new software and having one more little thing to do every two days and something big to do every two months. On Monday, an editor from a local publication I haven’t written for before called to ask me to do a particular story, due the middle of next week. Sorry; no time for what would amount to a little investigative piece with so short a deadline, given everything else I was up to. I recommended another writer, and the editor said she might check with her, but she might also just hold the assignment until I had more time. Gee, thanks. Not this year.
    Then the editor at Rio Nuevo e-mailed me, asking if I could come in the next day to do the final proof on a new little book about poisonous critters, then compile the index. Sorry, no time this week. Well, what if I did the index over the weekend? It’s just a little book. OK, OK, I’d do the index, later, but not the proofing.
    Then late yesterday the editor of a local publication for which I’ve written fairly regularly called with an assignment, due early next week (he always calls about a week before something is due). This would require less work than the piece I’d turned down the day before, a couple of phone interviews, a little Internet research, maybe a drive by a building downtown rather than actually venturing inside it if I’m going to keep my time down. The whole thing, including the writing, would take only two or three hours. OK, but no way could I turn it in by Tuesday, since I wouldn’t even be able to think about doing this until about then. So I got an extra day. Thrilling.
    My problem, obviously, is that I’ve never learned to say “no,” but I am apparently getting better at saying “later,” which is fine until “later” becomes “now.”
    So there you have it, my too-busy-to-blog post. Probably the first in a series.