I’ve been writing stuff online for a long time. I think I started my first ongoing column around 2000, and for a while there had multiple weekly columns going across a few different sites doing stuff from pop culture writing to reviews of comics, prose, TV, and movies for years. Somewhere in there I started using my blog as well.
Then a few years back I nuked 99% of the content on this site, because it was getting top heavy. Just a crushing amount of posts, honestly, and a lot of not worth anything, if I’m being honest. That was also around the time I stopped using the site as much. I kept up the list of published works for people to find, and kept things going for people to find and hire me for editing work (more on that later in this post), but as far as original content goes I just …mostly stopped.
I was doing a lot of novels and comics and a full time day job that often asks me to work longer hours and well, I stopped pretty much completely.
Then I realized late this year that I missed it. A few months ago I started to post once a week, hoping that it would re-ignite the love for blogging I used to have. It did. And so here we are. But where does this site go from here? What does 2023 look like? That’s what this post is for. This is me laying out my plans for 2023 on this site for you.
2023 will see a new post each week. That, of course, excludes any unforeseen calamity in my life. I try to work on a bunch of them in advance but I can’t count out that something could happen. Still. My goal, one that I will push myself as hard as I can to meet, is a new post every week.
But what will they be? I have some plans. As of now they include:
A post the last week of each month January-October talking about some albums I’ve been enjoying the hell out of that month, with the end of November instead being the now annual Top Ten Albums of the Year post.
There will actually be a bunch of music content. Right now all of Feb will hopefully be music posts, actually, with three back to back Digging Deeper posts like the recent one into Synthwave. All three will be related and build on the previous week.
Next week I’ll be starting a new ongoing column to sit alongside Digging Deeper called These Bands Go Together which will be a post about a few different bands that, even though they might not make up a real, established genre, are things that, for reasons I’ll explain, go together. I have a few of those in early planning stages right now.
There will be random pop culture musings, mostly of stuff from when I was a kid, and one or two of those, like the recent Thundercats post, will be reposts of content that had been removed from this site, but ended up published in one of my books of humor essays. Gonna keep the reposting to a total minimum though and focus on new thoughts.
There will be, time willing, some bits of flash fiction as well. I don’t know how much, but it will happen every now and then.
I also intend to post some weird funny stories of my life, from time to time, when they feel worth the time to type out and have other people read. I dunno, I don’t want to bore you, or myself.
I don’t think there will be many reviews of movies (I talk movies on my podcast Destroy All Culture already) or comics (that can get awkward reviewing things in spaces I work).
As always, there will be the section of the site to give you a way to look up any published things I’ve done, but any announcements of new projects coming out will be extra posts and not be used to replace a weekly post. That feels a bit snake-eating-its-own-tail to me.
You can also hire me to edit for you, sending inquiries through this very site. Prose and comics, I have been editing it all for literal decades, and want to find some new clients this year. I love doing the work.
I’ll also still be working a full time day job that often asks for extra hours, as well as writing prose books, and comics, and working on some things in other mediums I can’t discuss right now. So all this blog stuff happens on top of that. Which is, really, kinda exciting. It opens a venue back up for me that those other spaces never really filled.
But please do keep in mind there is no editor here. I’m flying without a net. That goes doubly for the flash fiction I would love to have an editor for the site but the editors I want to work with (very rightly) charge money for their services, and it would also require me to always have a good solid lead for posts so they have time to work, and I have time to put in edits. It just isn’t, this year, feasible.
Back to this year, though, as I said above, the end of November will see the Top Ten Albums of the Year. The week of Xmas will see another holiday flash fiction bit (though with it on a Monday I guess it’ll drop late the week before?) and the last week of the year will see a post titled Looking Ahead Into 2024 where I’ll lay out, like I am here, what 2024 will be on this site.
Will it be weekly posts again? More frequent? Less? I don’t know yet, either!
Now here is where I ask for a tiny bit of your help. If you like a post here, share it. Please. I don’t advertise, hell the links to buy my books aren’t even affiliate links, there is no money being made off you here. I do this because I like doing it and want you to enjoy your time reading it.
But sharing what you like does help, as more people reading the blog makes, just being honest here, easier to push hard when deadlines and work are eating me alive but I want to get you the next weekly post.
Also, there’s a contact form on the about page. Use it to send me ideas of posts you might like! Bands you’d like me to talk about, or pop culture things you’d like to hear me be (probably) silly about. Whatever. I don’t promise to use the idea but I will always welcome them. You can also hit me up on any of the social media places linked to in the sidebar. There are many. Choose your fighter.
Thanks for reading this and I hope you’ll stick around for the year, I’m pretty excited about it. You can subscribe (on the sidebar) and get an email every time I update (I do recommend doing this if you can, you will just get an email when I update (and no other time!) so you don’t have to rely on happening to see a post on social media that is easily missed), or just check back, or follow me on some social media thing, I tend to post when I update. Either way, even if you never come back, thanks for reading this and I hope your 2023 is everything you want and, more importantly, need it to be.
