It with great pleasure, and also a palpable sense of relief, that this afternoon I am able to announce MyDD's new crew of weekend writers. In addition to Nancy Scola, who will continue to help us out, four others writers will be on the front page over weekends:

• Mike Connery, of Future Majority
• Jared Roebuck, of Lies Before Breakfast
• Melissa Ryan, of Connecticut Local Politics
• Shai Sachs, of Planting Liberally

I am very excited about this group, who I think will offer a diverse range of perspectives and areas of focus on the progressive movement. Considering that Jonathan Singer started out as a weekend writer on MyDD, I'm sure we can expect great things from all of them.

There were many very good applicants, but in the end I went with the four who had the most extensive prior blogging experience. When I started writing full-time on MyDD more than three years ago, two things I learned very quickly is that blogging is neither an innate skill, nor like other forms of writing. Instead, it is a unique craft that requires extensive practice. It took me months before I was able to produce three or four quality articles in a single day, much less twenty articles a week. As such, while simultaneously helping out "the long tail," I wanted to go with people who were already familiar with the craft.

Personally, it will be nice to take a step back during weekends for a little while. Over the past three years, even including weekends and holidays, I have probably spent more than half of my waking hours either writing a post, or thinking about what to write next. While this has been undoubtedly one of the most remarkable periods of my life, in order to restore some sense of balance to my life it might be time take actually take a few weekends off in a row. I'm sure that before long I will be writing six or seven days a week again, but from time to time we all need to recharge. Please treat the new crew well. I'll see you again on Monday.

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