The schedule

It terrifies me to set a schedule for this website. It terrifies me because over the last two days I’ve been taking care of a fever-induced 14-month-old and my time, friends, is never really mine anymore. Everything could be peachy, he could stay healthy for the entirety of football season, and I could have the time to create what I hope I can for you every week. Or I could get a full-time job tomorrow. Or I could get enough freelance work that what I promise desperately needs to be scaled back. What I think is likely is that — as this is my first season writing with this threat of my time not being mine over my head — there will be fits and starts. There is, in fact, already one guaranteed fit of me vacationing to a resort for the week between Week 2 and Week 3.

But I am going to tell you my aims for the schedule for this season, and they are as follows:

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Monday and Friday: Recap posts (free). I will write about what happened in the game(s) last night that mattered most to me. What caught my eye. What I spent most of my time thinking about. What fantasy takeaways I have. If I suddenly have decided the Giants are winning the Super Bowl. Stuff like that. I don’t exactly have a template for this sort of thing, but I figure Friday’s post will be a good test run. If I have an island game and things are profoundly uninteresting, I’ll probably topically adopt something from the news earlier that day.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: Analysis posts (locked to subscribers only). Tuesday will have an MNF recap rider on top. I would be lying if I told you I knew exactly what would catch my eye — I assume there will be a weekly Texans thing in here if that’s what you’re looking for. But I also will probably want to riff on some stats I find utterly fascinating, or perhaps I want to write a long treatise about how weird the media is being about Comeback Player of the Year. There are a lot of potential avenues here.

I am hoping that by warning you ahead of time that certain pieces will be locked, you will not complain too hard about these things. I know that based on my general experiences with the internet that will not be true, but hope is a fun strategy.

When you pay me, not only are you valuing my work in a way that helps me keep the pinwheel going, you are also allowing me to send said 14-month-old to daycare (upfront moment: daycare costs about $350 a week, whether he goes or not) so that I can actually do any of this at all. I am not holding you up and there is no obligation. But without at least a reasonable amount of money, I will have to look at the financials and make a decision on whether my time is more valuable writing or reading the same book to my kid four times in 25 minutes. I have told you which choice I would prefer by being here, but if the wheels do not get greased I might have to reassess that.

Thank you very much to those of you who have subscribed already without any threat of locked posts. Feel free to tell me things you would like to see written about, and perhaps I will make them.

There are eventually bigger dreams than this, and I imagine once I get a groove established I will have more to tell you about how they will go. But it’s hard to understand how plausible any of this is without actually just doing the thing, so in the words of Steph Stradley, let’s do the thing and win the points.

Man, Free is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.