Sunday Newscape Magazine

For those of us in the writing industry we all know about that dreaded deadline. I don’t know why, but when that deadline looms it seems that my clock ticks faster. Even more irritating is I can actually hear it! My wife who is my proofreader and the only person in this world who truly understands how I think looks forward to my column each week.

Well, it’s Thursday. The clock is ticking to have my column on my editor’s desk by Friday morning or else I will hear that sound in my e-mail box from his office. I spent all night Wednesday into Thursday preparing what I thought was a powerful piece of work.

My wife arrived home Thursday night after working all day well aware of the job she needed to do. Unfortunately, I could not present my work because our printer was out of ink. I knew this days ago so I’ll take the blame on this one. So off to Staples I went.

It was almost 6.30 pm and I cheerfully handed over my work thinking I created a masterpiece to help millions. After about five minutes I looked over to my wife with her back to me and started to visualize a big speech bubble above her head with a big question mark in it. Then I heard the most insulting words out of her mouth that tore my heart out. “Did you stay up all night writing this?”, she asked. I knew at that point I was in trouble.

The next hour was a battle to remember. I thought I had created a masterpiece, she thought it was crap. She wanted to sit down with me and rewrite it; I was too frustrated to hear anything at this point. Our words became so heated that one of our daughters thought we where fighting. The only thing I wanted was to step back, refresh my mind and do the man thing, take a nap.

When I awoke, I realized she was right. Her insult really hurt me, but I got over that. She was just trying to help. I brushed off any remaining ego that was left and started writing again.

I learned a great lesson today. After reviewing my column I realized it was crap and I felt that I was not giving my readers what they deserved.  In other words, it did not come from my heart, but just a bunch of redundant words put together at the last minute. I was lucky not to be on my wife’s payroll or else I would have been fired. Thanks honey!