I drafted thousands of words during the French Open and Wimbledon, but I never created the finished piece (or pieces) I envisioned. With the French, Wimbledon and even the Olympics long over, and with the U.S. Open starting next week, the topicality of those pieces has in some ways faded away completely.
In other ways--particularly in some of the themes I explored in those drafts--that topicality rises up again. That's one reason I'm going to be finishing and publishing some of those pieces over the next week.
There's another reason, too. I had a vision for more substantial pieces than anything I'd written in a long time, but my perfectionism got in the way of finishing those pieces in the days immediately following the tournaments. Well, an important aspect of Free Refills is that I get to live and write about and publish about my process as it happens, and this (the drafting but not publishing) is something I've lived with all summer. It's not an exaggeration to say that I have a karmic debt to clear, and now's the time to do so.