In Need of Good Writing...

When you write a column for a weekly newspaper there are certain timelines that are important to meet. This column usually has until Tuesday night to be submitted. But my Tuesday nights can sometimes be busy so I hate to wait until that time to put something together because if something comes up this jumble of words may not come to fruition.

So I write this column on Monday nights to beat the rush and then reread it on Tuesday just in case I find something that needs to be amended or fix grammatical errors or misspelled words.

One of the problems with writing something on Monday that will be read on Thursday is that things might change during that timeline, which could make what has been written sound a bit foolish.

Such was the column that I wrote last week concerning the NFL lockout. As the week progressed it looked like there could be a chance that the lockout just might come to end. Of course, if it had then the words I wrote would have had little meaning and actually might have sounded a bit stupid. But it didn’t end until Monday, so I guess I got a little lucky.

Now I feel that I need to be honest with the people who read this column. Face it; I don’t need to be honest with the folks who don’t peruse this part of the paper because they typically don’t like sports anyway. But for those of you who take the time I want you to know that I was actually hoping that the lockout would continue until at least Saturday, even though I was criticizing those who were dragging their feet and were putting the NFL season in jeopardy.

So basically I was really just looking out for my interests and at the moment hoping that the owners would agree on settling the lockout after Thursday for my sake. I hope that makes sense and that you can understand those thoughts of mine. Wow, I guess confession really is good for the soul.

By the way, as of Monday the owners and the players have agreed to the deal and it looks like the teams will be reporting to preseason camp this week and the season will be coming to an NFL city near you, especially if you live in Seattle or another NFL locale anyway.

Now I know that all of this happened without any harsh environmental forces invading the conference rooms. I still wish that would have happened. I think it would be interesting to see these guys walking out to the press conferences with shirts filled with perspiration moisture saturated near their armpits. But that’s just me.

Now that the lockout has ended the free agent season will begin, which should have been over by early spring and we would all know who the QB in Seattle would be. Maybe this will be a bonus for the Seahawks.

It seems like when they think too much they end up with some players who are a bust. So we can only hope that this lockout will help Seattle in the long run but we will have to wait and see.

Next week I hope to have some great things to write about and not have to do a ranting Mea Culpa. I hope that in a week I will become the kind of writer that will jot down some ideas that you can really enjoy. Well, at least that’s my plan for now.