For starters, as anyone who has ever worked in small-town journalism will tell you, the title “editor” is somethat misleading. Scratch that. Very misleading. The editor of a weekly like ours doesn’t sit behind a desk and dish out assignments to a staff of reporters, send photographers out to get the important shots, and buff up rough copy until it turns into glittering journalistic gems. Sometimes a weekly will have several reporters on staff, but just as often the editor is it. That’s certainly the case where I work, where I am the entire news staff. I report and write the stories. I shoot the pictures. I type, proofread, copyedit and rewrite all the press releases, letters, announcements and so forth that pour into the office. I also lay out the paper (which, believe it or not, we still do by cut-and-paste), and do a few other things to boot. Except for the ads, which I’m not involved with, about ninety to ninety-five percent of everything in the paper each week originates with me, is typed by me, edited or rewritten by me, or had some other type of direct involvement from me.

As you can probably guess, all of that usually takes a fair amount of time. There are many long days, many nights spent covering local government meetings, many weekends, many holidays, and always, always, always the deadline. It’s not your usual creative writer’s kind of deadline, either — you know, where you’re late with the book and call your editor to beg for an extra two weeks, or running behind on the story so it gets bumped back to the next issue of the magazine. This is a deadline that is unmoving, unchanging and absolutely unforgiving. You get the paper out every Wednesday no matter what else is going on in town, in the world, or in your own life. I’ve gone without sleep for two days to get out the paper. I’ve skipped trips to get out the paper. I’ve turned down enticing invitations to get out the paper. I’ve missed family activities and milestones to get out the paper. I’ve written when there were no words left to get out the paper. Once, many years ago now, I even showed up on Wednesday with pneumonia and a fever of 104 to get out the paper.

And here may be the real reason I haven’t written much about my day job, because just talking about it can sound an awful lot like whining. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to whining about my work — I’ve been known to whine about it quite a bit, as a matter of fact — but I usually try not to do it in public.

So, no, I’m not whining. Really. I’m just kind of laying it out, warts and all, for those who are curious.

I don’t always like my day job. Sometimes, truth be told, I really sort of hate it. There are days (or weeks, or months) that I feel myself teetering along a fraying tightrope stretched above a yawning canyon of total burnout. But there are times I actually do kind of like it. It’s never boring, and that’s a big plus. No matter how much of it is exactly the same week after week, there is always plenty that’s new and interesting, too. I’m proud to be part of an important industry and represent a noble species like the weekly small-town newspaper. I’m proud that our particular paper has been publishing for over 130 years; its pretty humbling to be part of a long, unbroken tradition like that. I’m delighted that we’re still independently owned and that we continue to fight the good fight against all the odds: a readership that is quickly aging and vanishing away, an alarmingly dwindling advertising base, an onslaught of competition from dozens of other sources, an onslaught so intense and unrelenting that even the biggest of the big city dailies are at serious risk, to say nothing of the little hole-in-the-wall rags like ours. Whenever I need a little inspiration to finish an impossible article, a little strength to keep typing, a little extra motivation to get out of bed at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday or pull myself together on Monday and start the whole weekly marathon over again … well, then, those things are usually enough to do it.

And that’s the long and short of it. Mostly long, I guess, longer than I thought it would be. But now you know. And you know that the next time I vanish from here for a few weeks at a time, I haven’t gone away for good. I’ll be back just as soon as the news allows.

Sometimes, when you’re apologizing for something you should have done but didn’t, you might have a perfectly valid excuse. Sometimes your excuse is a little half-assed and lamebrained. And sometimes you have no excuse at all.

In my case, I think it’s probably a bit of all three.

If I tried, and if I really wanted to, I could fill long pages with detailed explanations of my summer, which actually included just about everything but a vacation. I could tell you about all the up-and-down-and-inside-out emotions of getting my daughters ready to go off to the University of Michigan, where they are now in their third week, and quite happily ensconced, thank you very much. I could tell you about the craziness in my day job, the way a usually quiet season when not much happens in the news business became instead a feverish hell of breaking stories and special meetings. I could tell you how I worked myself to a point that felt dangerously close to exhaustion or collapse, and how, when I wasn’t working, I didn’t have much energy or enthusiasm left over for much of anything else — blogging least of all. I could tell you a lot, but it wouldn’t really serve any purpose, and frankly it all sounds kind of depressing when you say it out loud or write it down.

But here’s the thing: it wasn’t really a depressing summer at all. It was just busy. It was a roller coaster. It was, well, life.

So now we know. Life isn’t just what happens when you’re busy making other plans; it’s what happens when you should be blogging.

For now, I’m back. I’m reading and writing and working and playing and trying to make sure that I carve out time for all those things that got swept aside, or merely ignored, over the past few months.

And I’m blogging.

Wow. You know what? It feels really, really good to be here.

After just finishing up this week’s newspaper, I now have two work days to write a substantial portion of next week’s edition. Everything that can get done in advance — everything that’s not, you know, news — has to be done by tomorrow afternoon.

Why the scramble? We’re leaving Saturday for vacation. A full week in Chicago. Our first real getaway since a trip to New York City in the summer of 2005.

I should be doing some things at home to get ready. Packing would be a good start. But I’ll have to settle for making mental lists of things to take and save the part where you actually find the items and put them into a suitcase for later — most likely Saturday morning, about an hour before we leave.

See you from the road. I’ll try to post a nice picture or two!