Sorry for the rambling verbosity...
Quote: steve by any other name @ October 10 2013, 12:12 PM BSTJust out of curiosity, how much time do people generally spend on their submissions?
I'm late to the party, but I'll answer:
For the past couple of series and up until this past weekend:
Going from Thursday onwards I've kept a text document in which I stick a headline/summary of news items and a link to (usually) BBC News. I'll almost obsessively keep adding to this every hour or so as long as I'm awake and near a computer... I'm obsessive as sometimes an interesting headline/story will pop up for an hour or two then get eaten by a bigger story.
Any ideas/jokes that occur to me in this time get jotted down in the document. And most ideas I go with are (very naughtily) the 1st thing I thought of within seconds of seeing the story...
During this time I also scan newspapers and find an online link for the document if anything catches my eye.
Knowing that the NJ webchats have said that they only really want news from noon Friday or later, I don't yet start writing up any sketches.
Then on Sunday I really go through the papers. And start procrastinating and trying to make 1 or 2 ideas work that I really should let go. I'd like to say that I usually end up on Sunday with 1-3 half written sketches or 1st drafts, though usually it's more like 1.5 half-written drafts.
I then panic on Monday morning as I realise that I've woken up with a couple of brilliant ideas for new sketches that I hadn't been working on,, and so try to quickly get done what I can in the 2-3 hrs before the deadline.
No matter how much I have done/written on the Sunday/Monday morning I always find a new idea that I prefer comes with just enough time left to do a half-assed job on it.
In total it's been frequent news-harvesting from Thursday with about 9-10 hrs of more serious attention on Sun/Mon.
So that was up to this weekend....
This past weekend:
I read how everyone else does it and figured that I shouldn't take the noon Friday start as gospel, since a few people mentioned having ideas/rough drafts by that point.
So I did the harvesting the same then 1-man-brainstormed Saturday morning for sketch ideas. Came out with something like 9 possibles.
I think I had the best part of 3 sketches written by the end of Saturday. Sunday saw several more written, mainly from Saturday morning's ideas, but also a couple on stories that broke on Saturday/Sunday.
Then the usual Monday panic as I realised that I had more ideas and no time to do them justice, but it didn't panic me as much as usual as I had a much better crop from the weekend.
The different working this weekend was interesting. I must have spent about 6 hrs on Saturday and probably 15hrs or more on Sunday, so I was knackered, but feeling quite good about the roll I'm on. So much so that I've been writing more sketches since the deadline ended - topical and non.
I usually take a couple of days off sketch.