Lost my voice

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Wow, this is weird: a Thursday where I don’t start out the day editing Cory Farley and Amanda Williams. It’s funny how people develop habits, behaviors, and when the behavior isn’t there, there’s a physical feeling that something’s missing.

The analogy that comes to mind is how I couldn’t stop probing the empty spot when my wisdom teeth were pulled, but that’s not quite right. There was something missing there. Teeth are actual, concrete things. But a behavior … when an action is missing, it’s not like the time is gone or wasn’t filled with something that may have exactly mirrored the behavior. For example, I simply edited something else; in this case, Kat Kerlin’s excellent cover story.

So what is this feeling of longing? Is it a sort of muscle memory or below-conscious-threshold memory, axons and dendrites firing purposelessly? I guess the only thing to fix this feeling is to find some new columnists to fill that void between the editorial and the news section.

I’ll tell you what though, we’ve already had quite a few really excellent submissions from people who want to replace our left and right columnists. We’ve even had a couple enquiries from people who don’t want to espouse a particular political point of view. Anyway, I’ll make the same offer I made before, in case you missed last week’s editor’s note: Send me three 600-word columns if you think you could be a great voice in the Reno News & Review, and you want to work for an embarrassingly low per column price. I left the deadline open-ended because I’m really looking for the right people, but I’m starting to think there are more writers out there than there used to be. So if you want to be considered, send in those columns sooner rather than later.