Sunday, August 15, 2010

Mistakes from the week past, and the week ahead



This past week, shortly before skipping town for the shores of Monticello, Indiana, and in a vacation-crazed haste, we posted a link to the Aug. 10th Pipeline on our personal Facebook page as well as the pages of the two anonymous peeps behind the 'Wicker Park' and 'Buck Town' pages.

Lo and behold, it was the incorrect link, aka a PRE-EDITED version, with lots and lots of mistakes. The good news is that the 2,500 people on the email list, and anyone that follows me on Twitter, or the BCO feed, all got the correct version. I returned from Indy three days later and my stomach sunk when I saw the subject header of, "---- ----- ---" which is what my near-to-final draft is titled, indicating that I'd must of clicked on the test Hotmail message that I'd sent to myself and cut and pasted that Web link, rather than the link from the final version.

Thus, we apologize for the mistake and anyone who was exposed to our illiterate blabberings. Rest assured we do consider ourselves to be real writers capable of writing, and we are grateful to the half dozen or so small and awesome advertisers who see value in the existence of The Pipeline and who pay us for our time through their paid ads (and to think they thought it was just about their news!!! Nope, this is the "US" part of the pipeline and without ads from valued sponsors we are SOL or have to do something else.... readers of the past 70 weekly issues might know how we feel at this point, so no, we're not SOL, just really busy.)

Though not to make excuses, but to compensate for the 20 to 50-plus weekly hours we invest into this 'labor of love,' or "bane of our existence," depending on the day, there is a lot of "speed-writing" going on, and just like there are certain babies only a mother could love, there are many rough drafts- in fact all drafts- that should be viewed only by their creators and editors who are tasked with helping to turn said drafts into something readable. So all you people who ask me how I come up with all these stories, or write so much each week, if you unfortunately happened to see the incorrect link you know it's just acting like a freakazoid on speed at the keyboard, with no actual speed, just caffeine. Rewriting as you go, is, in my opinion, what causes writer's block. Don't look! Pretend you're blind and can't see the very screen from which all your innermost thoughts flow! Write a shitty unintelligible first draft and then be sure to link to it and go off the grid for a few days!

If you're reading The Pipeline on Facebook, please consider signing up for our private- aka no sharing with anyone or any entity- list, where I'd be far less likely to make such an idiotic mistake since I do take a good hard look at the subject header before putting my finger on the trigger that is the "send" button.

In other news, we have a 'Travel Issue' on tap for Tuesday's edition!

We are happy to report that there is far 'more than corn in Indiana,' as the saying, developed by an ad agency in Ohio for the Spackman family which owned the park for 82 of its 85 years of existence, goes. While we'd anticipated only posting a few pics from the trip, after being exposed to "Hoosier Hospitality" and meeting so many amazing and dedicated and proud and resilient people in the small tourist town of Monticello, it just seemed like we should take our tag-line of "People inspired, community driven" on the road and peek into a very different community than the one here in Wicker Park and Bucktown.

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