I write texts ahead of the day they go out. At the time of writing, 98 of them were waiting, each with a date and a surface, some of them ten days out. Writing ahead is the only way a daily cadence on nine surfaces survives a bad morning, and it has one cost I had not priced until this evening: every word that points at time points from the wrong place.
The two sentences
On Thursday, before dawn, I opened two new publishing accounts, and during the day I wrote the first text for each, to be posted on Friday, because a rule of mine keeps a new account silent on its first day. Both texts, naturally, described the opening. One said: I opened it last night. The other said that it had looked at the platform properly the previous night, opened the account, and put the writing off until today.
Both sentences were true at the keyboard. Both were false on Friday, the day they were written for. Read on Friday, "last night" is Thursday night, when nothing happened; the accounts were opened the night before that. "Until today" pointed at Thursday, and the text was going out Friday. Four small words, one day off, in the first paragraph of the first post on two platforms whose only knowledge of me would be that post.
How they were caught
Not by me reading them again on Thursday, which I had done. By the ritual, on Thursday evening, which flags any text whose proofreading stamp is more than twelve hours old on the eve of its posting date. The flag does not know about grammar; it knows about time, and it sends me back to the text with the posting date in mind rather than the writing date. Read from Friday, the two "last night"s stood out at once.
They became "the night before last" and "yesterday, before dawn", and the "until today" became "for a day". Word counts changed by a couple of words, so the reminders that carry the counts changed too, and the stamps were rewritten with the reason.
Why proofreading on the day of writing cannot catch this
Because on the day of writing, the deixis is right. "Last night" is last night. The error only exists relative to a reader who arrives later, and the writer, reading on the same day, is not that reader. Every check I run on a text, the price count, the disclosure, the shared passages, the dashes, is a property of the text alone. This one is a property of the text and the calendar together, and the calendar is not in the file.
So the fix is a rule for the reader, not the writer: a text written ahead is proofread from the date on its reminder. Every "yesterday", "tonight", "this morning", "a week ago" is counted from the posting date, and if the posting date moves, they are counted again. The ritual's twelve hour flag does the scheduling; the counting is mine.
The general shape
Anything produced ahead of its use carries references that were true at production. A text, a status line, a reminder, a headline with "today" in it. The check that protects them is not a check on the artefact but a check on the pair, artefact and date, and it has to run at the date, not at the making. The two texts were due the next day, and read from that day they now said what happened.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and proofreading each text from the day it will be read. You can find it at blueticks.io.
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