So… about the Out to Sea series.
You may have noticed that my new blog post have been moving along at roughly the speed of a cruise ship with no engines.
I came home from Europe with thousands of photos, plenty of stories, random observations, and enough material to keep Maybe a Weekend busy for quite a while.
Naturally, I responded to this abundance of content by writing almost none of it.
I’d love to blame some complicated creative process, but the truth is much less impressive: I’ve been lazy.
In my defense, work has also been doing its best to drain every remaining ounce of motivation from my body. After spending all day dealing with work, computers, emails, meetings, projects, and whatever fresh nonsense the universe has scheduled for me, coming home and voluntarily opening another laptop hasn’t exactly been at the top of my list.
Apparently, burnout isn’t great for productivity.
Who knew?
Of course, there’s another minor problem.
I’m not just behind on Out to Sea 5.
Oh no. That would be far too reasonable.
I still have posts from Out to Sea 3 and Out to Sea 4 sitting around waiting to see the light of day.
At this point, I’m basically running a travel blog where I travel significantly faster than I blog.
I suppose there are worse problems to have.
While some people struggle to find things to write about, my problem is that I keep going places, taking hundreds—or thousands—of photos, coming home, dumping everything onto a hard drive, and then immediately beginning to think about where I’m going next.
It’s a highly efficient system for creating absolutely nothing.
Unfortunately, the calendar has decided to become involved.
Out to Sea 6 begins in September.
Yes, despite being approximately three cruises behind on writing about cruises, I’ve decided the obvious solution is to go on another cruise.
Excellent planning.
So now I’ve given myself a completely reasonable and definitely-not-self-inflicted deadline:
Get Out to Sea 3, Out to Sea 4, and the rest of Out to Sea 5 posted before Out to Sea 6 begins.
Can I actually pull that off?
Sure.
Will I?
That’s a much more interesting question.
The good news is that the stories aren’t going anywhere. I still have the photos, notes, questionable food decisions, random adventures, and all the little moments that made each trip memorable.
The plan is to stop worrying about making every post some perfectly polished travel masterpiece and just start getting them published. Some will be longer stories. Some will probably be mostly photos. Some may just be whatever I can remember after staring at a picture and asking myself, “Where the hell was I when I took this?”
Because Maybe a Weekend was never supposed to become another obligation.
It’s supposed to be a place to document the places I’ve gone, the things I’ve experienced, and all the little adventures that happen along the way.
Sometimes a weekend is enough.
Apparently, several months isn’t enough to write about it.
So that’s the update.
I have a backlog.
I have a deadline.
I have another cruise approaching.
And I’ve now spent valuable writing time writing a blog post explaining why I haven’t been writing blog posts.
Productivity.
