Taking Our Time

'People always ask how much of your time is spent researching and how much of your time is spent on writing? But nobody ever asks me how much time I spend thinking. And writing is thinking.'
--Historian David McCullough on NPR's Diane Rehm show yesterday, justifying why he never apologizes for using a manual Royal typewriter, which he bought second-hand in 1965, and which he called "a magnificent piece of American machinery, built in 1940."

No Juice. On this, my 20th wedding anniversary (dinner out with the wife tonight, and treats and gifts later), my thoughts are also with my pal and SPJ colleague, Denise Polverine, editor of Ohio's most heavily visited website, Cleveland.com. It carried this announcement today: "Special Edition. Important message to our readers: July 6--a power outage at our hosting facility continues to disrupt our service. We will provide news updates on this special version of the site until we can restore to normal service. We are also posting stories from Today's Edition of the Plain Dealer below." I won't try to capture any thoughts about what a 20th anniversary feels like, till I've digested it some. That could take hours, days or weeks. Who really knows? After all, I'm a magazine writer in the great tradition of the wine company that once liked to exclaim in its TV ads: no wine before its time. Here at Working With Words, we feel the same about undigested fragments of thought, feeling and emotion. When it's done, you'll get it. And not a moment before...