Summertime...

"…and the living is easy."

I recommend that you write in a structured and predictable way during four eight-week periods every year, thirty-two weeks in all. Each of those periods should give you between 20 and 120 hours of writing time (between half an hour and three hours a day), in which to write paragraphs, 27 minutes at a time. That's between 40 and 240 paragraphs (between one and six journal articles worth of prose) that are written deliberately, always having known the day before exactly what and when you would write. In addition to a one-week spring break and another one-week break in the fall, that gives you about a month and a half around Christmas and about twelve weeks during the summer to unwind, i.e., to write when and how you feel like.

I follow roughly the same routine here at RSL, and I'm now going into full summer mode. During my thirty-two weeks of planned blogging I always know the night before what I will write the next morning. I always know exactly when I will be writing (as does my family, so they can leave me alone). The results are there for you to browse in the archives.

But now, like I say, it is summer. I will be blogging "freely", posting whenever I feel like it. Writing at odd hours … on impulse, if you will. Even responding to inspiration! I'm not against those things, you see. I'm not an enemy of freedom. I merely suggest that for thirty-two weeks of the year a serious scholar should subject their freedom to discipline, should spend a determined amount of hours writing down what they know so that their peers can learn from them and correct them.

For those of my readers who have gotten used to a new post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, I apologize for the interruption of regular service. There'll probably be at least one or two posts per week, and I'll tweet them when I put them up. In mid-August I'll become my regular old dependable self again.

Have a great summer!