Post the fifty-second

or, some things I've learned doing this every Wednesday for a year

Last year, almost to the day, I posted my first weekly post here on Substack. It wasn’t written that week, in fact it was a piece I’d been working on, off and on, for ages. I’d even pitched it once, without results.

But I needed a creative outlet, a place to write what and how I wanted, and so Kathmandu Alley Cat was born. I chose Wednesday primarily because it was neither the beginning of the week nor the weekend, but a day when I anticipated having more time. Once a week seemed challenging yet doable.

Honestly? Some weeks, it’s been a lot more challenging than I could have ever anticipated. But for me, it was essential that I stick to the plan. Everyone’s different, of course, but I can write, re-write, and edit a piece to within an inch of its life, and come back to it later and still find some way to “improve” it. This can lead to never finishing things, because of feeling you could always, somehow, make it just that little bit better. Hitting that “Send to everyone now” button on a fixed schedule forced me to confront that.

Is every week a winner? No, of course it isn’t. Some weeks the topics have been rather, how can I put this—thin? I worried no one would read it or rather that they might and then wouldn’t like it, or might not think it was worth their time.

Which leads me to the next thing I learned: not everything you write is going to be wonderful, and not everyone will love it, and that’s okay, too. But if you are writing—and putting yourself out there—regularly, I believe you stand an infinitely better chance of improving and writing things that will resonate than by refusing to put your work out there unless it’s perfect, aiming for an impossible ideal. (Related to this, sometimes people have told me they loved a post that I had felt wasn’t super interesting, or had pulled out of my hat. So you never know.)

On the practical side, sometimes I write the week’s piece a few days early, but there’s been many a time I’ve written it on Wednesday, with midnight looming. Midnight is the cut-off time I’ve set for myself. I’m a night owl: if it was anytime Wednesday night, before long it would be Thursday morning, and… you see where I’m going here. Even if I was exhausted or lacked inspiration, I knew that if I skipped a day it could easily become a week, and soon it’d be all over, the impetus gone. So midnight it was.

There was the time I hit publish at 11:59 pm, skipping, out of necessity, my third or eighth proofread. And yes—once I did go over midnight. A dear friend was back in Nepal for a brief visit and I wasn’t going to miss out on precious time with her because it was Wednesday. I got home late, happy, and that week’s post went up at 12:03 am on Thursday morning. I have no regrets; some things are worth breaking your own rules for.

Finally, the inconsequential: I did not expect titles and subheadings to be such a challenge. Ideally—occasionally—I thought of a good one right off. Mostly I didn’t, and had to really put in time to thinking about it; sometimes, as months passed, I’d choose a title only to find later that I’d virtually repeated myself from an earlier post. And more times than I’d like to admit, I filled in those two fields literal minutes before my (self-imposed) deadline. Headlines are hard, y’all. My hat’s off to people who can write good ones, consistently.

Years ago, a friend wisely said to “write for an audience of one”—even if no one ever read it but me. At the beginning, this was literally only read by a half-dozen friends and family. Now the majority of readers are—by far—people I’ve never met.

To each one of you, whether we’ve met in person or not, thank you for welcoming me into your inboxes each Wednesday. It’s not something I take for granted.