What's Behind the Curtain isn't all that Interesting

Here's a sneak peek at my writing process for a blog post.

1. Get an idea for a post. This can come from anywhere or anything. Some common examples are:
• I remember a band I've not listened to and go find my favorite song on youtube.com and remembering how much I like the band blam-o! I create a post with that video embedded.
• I can click a link in one of the many daily emails I receive and read an article about some topic that interests me and blam-o! I create a post with a link to that article.
2. Access Blogger.com and do the mechanical steps to create a blog post. I've already decided I want to create a post by the time I reach blogger.com and I may even have a link or a snippet of text in my clipboard. If I do, I immediately paste a link or a snippet of text associated with the idea into the new blog post. Sometimes, I will have a title before anything else - something will come to me and before I know the theme of a post, I have a catchy phrase that is a first draft of a title.
3. Let me share my thought process for this specific post. I subscribe to many Google alerts and receive daily emails. For my Metallica Google alert, there is a headline, and if it is an article, the headline is followed by the first few words of the article. It's typically enough to hook me into clicking the link and reading the article. That's what happened today. I read these words

   When you think of the heave metal rock band Metallica gothic fashion and the Black album may come to mind

   and clicked the link. When I got to the article, I immediately selected the text, went to blogger.com, created this post and pasted that text, as shown below:
   
4. What interested me about this text is the clumsiness of the writing.
• Regardless of your opinion of Metallica, the phrase "heavy metal rock" is odd.
• The writer should have selected one adjective - either "heavy metal" or "rock" - and stuck with it.
5. I have no idea what possessed the writer to choose "gothic fashion" as a first thought about the band.
• As shown in the screenshot above "gothic" tripped the blogger.com spellchecker. It wanted to replace "gothic" with "Gothic" which, since it's being used as a proper noun these days, I'm okay with.
• If the writer was using "Gothic fashion" to refer to the Load / ReLoad era, then that reference might have been better served to go in chronological order instead of reverse chronological order. The Black album was released in 1991; Load was released in 1996. How do I retain that information in my brain? It was released the year Megan was born and I had a review of it published in ICON, which was the weekly newspaper I was lucky enough to have publishing my music reviews.
6. With a new post created and a small germ of an idea in my mind, I begin to compose the post. The writing process begins. Depending upon the reason for creating the post, the writing process can last a few seconds, a few minutes, or several minutes. If I'm simply embedding a video from youtube.com, I may only actually write a sentence that explains why I embedded the video. When I created the post with the Asia video earlier this week, I didn't want to write much.
7. After I proofread - yes, I proofread my posts - I click Publish and release the post to the wild.
8. If I have a snarky comment, I use my imaginary editor to add an "Editor's Note" so that it appears I am not the author of the snarkiness. Another use for this strategy is to add a comment that reflects a change in 'something' related to the post after it was originally published. Maybe I was misinformed about a subject and after learning I was wrong, I will update the post reflecting my new information.

To read the article that generated this post, read the article here.