By the time most of you read this, you’ll be awake for the day and I won’t. The average MCC entry goes live between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Eastern, depending on numerous factors. A large portion of my audience is asleep and won’t see the results till morning at the earliest. When it comes to feedback, I’ve had to learn to live with delayed gratification. Sometimes I have a fanciful nighttime daydream in which small crowds keep clicking “Refresh” and asking each other, “Is the next one up yet? How about now? Now? Now?” My life doesn’t quite work that way, so I have to wait a day for results, pacing back and forth inside my mind all the while.

I write almost exclusively at night, after everyone else in my time zone is asleep, shortly before I pass out myself. The MCC archives would reveal a minority of daylight entries (most of those on weekends) if the current blog template included time stamps. Part of the blame rests on my circadian clock, which has been set on “evening person” ever since my previous job, where I found myself scheduled and honed over time for night-shift work out of necessity. Thanks to years spent as a restaurant closer, mornings are anathema to me; evenings, I come alive. Afternoons vary.

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