First, I'd like to wish anyone reading my blog a Happy and Healthy New Year. I can't believe it's 2014 already. I'd have wished folks one earlier, but I was out of town over the holidays.
Second, I'd like to explain why there have been so few entries on my blog the last couple of months. There are actually several reasons for this. The first and foremost was work -- I made my last post right before Thanksgiving, and of course went away for the holiday, and then when I got back, I became absolutely deluged. I teach college, so some of this was the inevitable end-of-term business (writing exams, grading exams, doing up final grades), which was predictable. But on top of this, we had an unusually frequent pattern of meetings for any time of year, but especially for the finals period (most semesters, meetings are suspended when finals roll around because no one has time for them). And then there was a panel I volunteered to be on, which saw me reading 30 10-page (or more) proposals in a week, and writing page-long reviews of each one. All of this adds up to the fact that I was swamped, and doing a lot of work at the computer otherwise, so the last thing I wanted to do of an evening (or a weekend) was sit down at the computer for more hours and do more writing.
But work isn't the only reason I haven't made any blog entries lately. Another is that I have been thinking long and hard about exactly where I want this blog to go. During this first year of my blog's existence, the type of content I put out has shifted three times. When I started, I wrote mostly opinion pieces about the comic-book industry, peppered with a few in-depth reviews of series (or statues). After a few months, I shifted to mostly talking about new comics as I bought them, with weekly "new comic-book night" entries becoming more common than opinion pieces or in-depth reviews. Later in the year I shifted to in-depth single-issue reviews, and I have done many of those (see the "reviews" tab at the top of this page for examples). Unfortunately, writing these long, in-depth reviews of single issues started sapping all the fun out of just reading comics, so I decided to stop that. I had planned on going back to the NCN entries, but then, as I said above, work interfered.
Over the holidays, I've been doing a lot of thinking about where I want this blog to go, and the short answer is that I'm not completely sure. For now, I am going to go back to a combination of opinion pieces and NCN entries. I will occasionally provide an in-depth analysis of large amounts of content (e.g., reviewing the entire Invincible series once I catch up with it).
But beyond that, I have begun working on a project that will probably take me most of this year, and which I will be discussing in the coming months. This project is superhero related, but I won't say any more about it until I see whether I can actually pull it off with the quality I demand of myself. I'm not trying to be coy, by the way. I just don't want to announce that I'm going to do something which, honestly, I have no idea whether I will be able to pull off. So, only when I have gotten a large enough chunk of the work done that I can be relatively sure I will be able to complete the project, will I announce what I am doing here.
Finally, I should also point out that I am doing a great deal of writing elsewhere. As I mentioned back in May, I am a staff writer for the Supergirl Home Page. Each week, on Fridays, I write an in-depth article of a Supergirl story. I've reviewed all 23 issues of The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl (which you can find here), all four issues of the 1990s Stern/Guice mini-series Supergirl, and am now in the process of reviewing the Silver Age appearances of the original Supergirl starting with Action Comics 252. So if you like reading my in-depth reviews, you can still find them appearing each week on that site.
I will close by saying that this blog has been a lot of fun to work on over the last year, and I look forward to a new year in which I can hopefully bring some more consistency to the content, and perhaps a little of my own creative content later in the year (or early in 2015). Also, I wish to thank each and every person who made a comment on my blog in 2013, whether you commented to agree or disagree with me. Good comments provoke thought, and provide information (such as the person who made me aware of a new Supergirl statue, which I now have on order from Amazon). So thanks for reading, and thanks for commenting, and again, have a happy, healthy 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment