Rain, Routers and Rough Drafts: How ChrisJM Actually Gets Made

It's 7:42 on a wet Tuesday in November. The kettle is on its second boil, there's a notebook wedged under the monitor stand because this table has never once been level, and a tab is open on my laptop with the title Draft 3 — do not publish until checked. This is the ChrisJM studio. Not a studio, really. A table, a chair that has seen better days, and a router that takes the weather personally.

People assume there's more machinery behind a site like this. A content team, a Slack channel, someone called Dom who handles 'strategy'. There isn't. There's me, a spreadsheet, and a fairly stubborn belief that you don't need much kit to make something worth reading. Since a few of you have asked how the sausage gets made — and since collaborators keep asking what my turnaround times actually look like — here's the full picture, gremlins included.

The kit, such as it is

Nothing here is impressive, which is rather the point.

• A five-year-old laptop that runs warm and complains if I open more than eleven tabs
• A second monitor perched on a stack of cookbooks, angled slightly wrong forever
• A mechanical keyboard loud enough to be heard from the hallway
• One A5 notebook and a biro, because ideas typed straight into a screen tend to come out bland
• A phone for voice notes on walks, which is where roughly half my decent sentences begin
• A mug, currently featuring a cartoon otter, that is never more than an arm's length away

The whole setup cost less than a mid-range telly. When people tell me they'd start a site 'if they had the gear', I usually send them a photo of the cookbook monitor stand and leave it at that.

Software that refuses to be interesting

My tools are chosen for dullness. Obsidian holds the sprawling notes — half-formed takes, links I'll never use, a list of things I want to write about 'at some point'. Google Docs does the drafting, mostly because the comment function means I can argue with myself in the margins without cluttering the page.

From there it's WordPress for publishing, Affinity Photo for the images that aren't stock, Audacity for the odd bit of audio, and a single spreadsheet that tracks every piece from 'idea' to 'live'. Backups go to an external drive and a cloud service, because I have lost work exactly once and it aged me about four years.

That's it. Two rules keep it manageable: if a tool takes more than an afternoon to learn, I don't need it, and if a tool hasn't been opened in a month, it gets cancelled. Boring stacks mean fewer excuses and fewer subscriptions eating my lunch money.

A typical week at the table

Monday is admin and ideas — about forty-five minutes, usually with a second cup of tea. I go through the notes, pick two or three things worth pursuing, and put them in the calendar. No heroic brainstorming sessions; if an idea can't survive being written down on a Monday, it probably wasn't much of an idea.

Tuesday mornings are for drafting, because that's when my brain works best and the house is quiet. I write longhand first for anything opinion-heavy, then type it up — slower, but it stops me writing in the same rhythm every time. Afternoons belong to the day job, so nothing site-related happens after two.

Wednesday is the edit, and the edit is where the piece is actually made. I read everything aloud, which is embarrassing but effective. Anything I stumble over gets cut. Anything that sounds like a press release gets cut twice. The target is always to lose about a tenth of the word count between draft and publish.

Thursday is images, links, formatting and a final read on a phone — because that's how most of you will see it. It goes live at 8am, then I close the laptop and go for a walk before I start fiddling with it again.

Friday is the newsletter, replies, and whatever housekeeping I've been avoiding. Weekends are mostly off, with an exception for the occasional thing that can't wait, like a finale everyone's talking about or a bit of news that'll be stale by Monday.

The broadband gremlins

We're on fibre-to-the-cabinet round here, which is fine right up until it isn't. On a good day I get download speeds that would make a city dweller shrug, and upload speeds that make me schedule image uploads for six in the morning before the neighbours wake up and start streaming.

When it rains hard, the connection drops for a minute or two at a time. This is somehow always during a CMS update. The workaround is a 4G dongle and phone tethering, plus a stubborn habit of saving constantly — Ctrl and S is basically a nervous tic at this point.

Other regulars: a plugin that decides mid-Thursday that it no longer gets on with another plugin; image files that upload at the wrong size for no reason anyone can explain; and the twice-yearly clock change, which has fooled me into scheduling a post an hour early more times than I'd like to admit.

What still goes wrong

Plenty. A headline with a typo that survived four reads. A slug that clashed with an old post and quietly redirected readers to a piece about a completely different programme. Forgotten alt text on about a dozen images before I added it to the checklist. Once, a draft went live while I was still in it — genuinely one of the more character-building afternoons of my life.

None of that is solved by talent. It's solved by a checklist: spelling in the headline, slug, alt text, meta description, mobile read, links clicked, publish. It takes four minutes and saves a small amount of dignity every week.

Why I haven't moved to a proper desk

I've thought about it. There's a spare room that would take a desk, a chair and a door that shuts. But the kitchen table does something useful: it makes the work a habit rather than a project. The kettle's there, the light's decent, and there's no sofa to sink into. When the table gets cleared for dinner, the work is done. That constraint — everything has to fit between breakfast and lunch — is why things actually ship.

So if you're a collaborator wondering why my replies come in bursts and why I ask for assets a week ahead, that's the reason. One person, a short window, a checklist. It's not glamorous, but it's honest, and it turns out that's most of what a small site needs.