I’m thinking of changing my approach to blogging

This past couple of years, I’ve noticed that the direction of my blog has skewed heavily in a certain direction. It’s mostly since I started talking about seasonal anime actually, I started to invest more and more time into episodic reviews and reacting to shows on a weekly basis as they came out. Here’s the thing, I’m not going to say this is a bad thing.

In fact, blogging like this introduced me to a whole little community that made me feel welcome and actually encouraged me to write more. The problem is, the more I focused on this aspect of blogging, the less time it felt like I had to spend on things that weren’t in aid of my blog.

There have been points where I have been updating my blog between three and five times a week, which I enjoyed a lot. Watching shows like Clone Wars, Demon Slayer and the Book of Boba Fett on a weekly basis and then posting reviews about them has been a ton of fun, it gives me more reason to think about the shows more deeply than I would otherwise.

The problem is, doing this is just so time consuming for me. I have to juggle it between working a job that has me out of the house nearly 50 hours a week, seeing friends and family, playing the games and watching the TV shows I need to watch for the blog posts themselves. All that, plus I’m trying to train for a change in career and find time to meet my new girlfriend. It’s all just becoming too much.

I feel, at the back of my mind, that I can still somehow “make it” as a writer as a career. Despite knowing full well that’s not going to happen. As just stated, I simply don’t have the time to invest in writing anymore than I do right now. Plus, the “obligation factor” that comes with having to write weekly posts about the same shows does inevitably come with an inability to write some posts that feel like they have any real substance to them in my eyes.

As much as I am loving the recent episodes of Demon Slayer, I really do struggle to think of anything to say besides “they fight” and “it looks amazing”. I suppose this is a form of burnout, one I feel on an increasing basis in January thanks to my hellious December schedule from both work and this blog. So, after doing pretty much the same thing to myself for the past three years, I feel like it’s time for me to mix it up a little.

Which is to say, I’m just going to post less and not worry about a schedule.

My increasing worry about my blog is that I’m writing posts without having anything interesting or unique to contribute to the greater conversation, especially when it comes to talking about popular Television or anime. I think part of that comes from listening to a podcast recently called “A more Civilised Age”, in which the hosts talk through episodes of The Clone Wars, as I did a few years back, and do it with so much more depth, intelligence and humour than I could hope to achieve.

I know I’m not an unintelligent person, but getting shown just how many smarter and funnier people there are out there doing the very same thing as I’m doing makes me think I should probably revaluate how I am spending my time and energies in my creative pursuits. This isn’t me trying to be the sad sack by the way, in the solitude of my own blog, I’m pretty assured in my own capabilities.

At the end of the day, this blog is my creative outlet, the thing that let’s me stretch a muscle I feel I need to stretch for my own mental health’s sake. The more I concern myself with meeting deadlines and getting posts out while they’re still hot and topical, the less I enjoy and invest in my writing.

Which is the new mentality I want to take into the future for my blog. Series like 3 Episode Rule and other seasonal anime reviews are most likely going to take a back seat, if not retire indefinitely. I might take a step away from talking about manga like Dragon Ball Super unless there is something happening In feel I want to talk about.

In short, I want to spend less time writing reviews and more time writing features, like this or the post I wrote the other week about the weird backlash to people enjoying Demon Slayer. This will probably mean my uploads are going to be much less frequent, but in all honesty, I need that time for myself. I have stuff I want to catch up on, people I want to spend more time with and want to feel like writing isn’t a chore anymore.

I’m going to finish talking about Star Wars: Rebels and continue talking about Demon Slayer. I just might not do it on such a regimented schedule. I’ll do it on my own time when I feel like doing it.

So yeah, that’s what’s on my mind in short. I just want to take a different approach to my blog, make it more personal and stop just saying things when I don’t have anything to contribute to the conversation. Thanks for reading this if you’ve gotten this far, and I’m sorry I’m such a bad consumer of other people’s blogs despite how much people continue to like my posts.

I’m not going anywhere, but in the grand scheme of priorities in my life, I’m bumping my blog down from near the top to somewhere in the middle.