Ten Famous People: A Bucket List (Epilogue)

The Bucket List has been a fun experiment.

So far, the most popular post in the series by traffic was Number Five (Gretzky), while least popular was Number Eight (Merkel).

The drinking angle was really an outgrowth of the excitement I felt about Modern Drunkard's new Clash of the Tightest drinking contest. The famous (living) people angle took a bit of work, but was kinda fun, too.  I was being  genuine, and really had to think about who made my list, and why.  Hell, it was probably more thought than I've put into my blogging in ages!  I kept each entry short (by my standards) and to the point, didn't go into a lot of detail, and tried not to presuppose character.

The real experiment was the writing and scheduling.  If you've been following my blogs or websites (any of them) for any length of time, you'll know that if a post ends with the words to be continued, it probably won't be.  I lose interest, run out of time, get sidetracked, etc, and it's rare to see a series completed.  That's not to say I haven't accomplished that:  my Blog Action Day series "The Power of We" was written over the course of a day, a vacation day I had set aside specifically for Blog Action Day.  My series "A Tale of Entitlement" took a while to complete but eventually got done, thanks to the prodding of a couple of my regular readers.

My original plan was to write The Bucket List as one complete post, in much the same way I wrote the Honourable Mentions list.  But as I started writing, I thought to myself, "CJ, why rip the Band-Aid off quickly when you can slowly pull it off over a period of several days?"

As usual, I had a point.  Anyone who's followed me for years is probably used to the pain, so I decided to present it as a serial.

This time, however, I planned ahead and wrote the whole series ahead of time.  It took a couple of lunch hours to write, and another to steal the pictures from Google Images.  I scheduled each post for 6 AM, which is shortly before I leave the house to catch my bus for work, so I could read it and make changes after the fact during my commute.  On the weekends, I'd read that day's post while I had my morning coffee.

I like the way it turned out, schedule-wise, and am going to employ this method in the future.

Do you know what else I liked?  Not having comments enabled.  I don't know that I'm going to re-enable them, will have to mull it over.  One gets tired of spam and morons.  Of course, I usually announce my new posts via social media (Google+, Twitter, and even Facebook) so, for the time being, if you feel you really must comment, do it there.  Just remember, I'm only polite and respectful to a point.

Join me next time as I (finally) present The Cone of Silence, a piece on distraction-free writing.