Friday, November 23, 2007

a blogger's conscience

I write and revise. I post.
Then I revise. I revise revisions. I tweak and tinker. I develop, refine, and reconstruct. Nothing you'll find here is off limits to my freakish editing compulsion. I just can't leave something alone if I notice it's not quite right for one reason or another, and this medium is, well, enabling.

Under typical circumstances, I do most of this before posting, leaving only minor touch-ups for post post. This post-a-day deadline is really putting the screws to me, though. I get down to the wire and have to post something skeletal and unsatisfactory. There's an awful lot of revamping going on after the fact.

I don't have many readers and certainly no one who checks in frequently enough to notice, but I do still wonder if I get away with it. And that's how I've realized I view my edits. I feel like I'm cheating or something.

Does anyone else feel this way? Am I reneging on a sacred blogger's compact hidden somewhere in the agreements I clicked through to create this thing? Is there some statute of limitations that dictates the point after which no editing is allowed?

3 comments:

Suzy said...

I don't think there is anything wrong with editing after the fact. It is your site, you are writing, change it if you need to do that.

Anonymous said...

Change to your heart's content. Blogging "rules" are arbitrary. It's your blog, you make the rules. Change the date, too, if you want. If you think it's wrong to change the date, don't.

I don't change the *content* of posts if someone has commented, but I'll fix a grammatical error. Unless that was what the comment was about! Ah, heck, I still might fix it. Might even delete the comment. ;-)

To me, it's YOUR blog. If you want to move the furniture around, spackle the holes, so be it.

erin said...

thanks suzy & pdxwoman!