I attend my first Festival of Lights in downtown Riverside, in which the Mission Inn is emblazoned with lights, animatronic figures move and fireworks go off, and write about it for my Sunday column. Have you ever been? The lights continue through Jan. 6 and the festival through New Year’s Eve.

This was a rare column written in the evening after an event rather than in a morning or afternoon. But it’s a big event and something I thought I ought to cover. Here was how my schedule worked.

In downtown Riverside Friday, I ate lunch, walked around downtown for color and spoke to some people camping out to watch, then went to my go-to coffeehouse to write a draft of the top portion of the column before it was time to head back to the event. When it was over, about 5:45, I ate dinner, then returned to my coffeehouse to finish the column just before closing time at 9 p.m. Drove home and uploaded two photos of my own, wrote captions and added them to the column before turning in. Saturday morning early, I made a couple of changes to the column, the main one being rewriting the last paragraph, then headed out for the day. Hope the effort of turning a column around on deadline was worth it!