On biting off more than I could chew…or, “man’s reach exceeds his grasp”…
Yeah, the posts slowed nearly to a stop for a long while. Sorry about that. Was a busy fall and it’s not slowing up this winter. One of the main reasons I tried for so long to keep to a routine of a review every day was that I know me; once I fall out of a schedule like that, it’s very hard to get traction again. I tend to over-analyze things and let great be the enemy of good.
The real trouble I got in was that when the days were getting shorter and I should have been happy to just knock out some short posts and keep the momentum going, I let myself fall into the trap of over-scheduling. There were a ton of anniversaries that I felt I needed to hit before the year was out and instead of just reviewing what I wanted or had just seen I was obsessing about getting all the ones I “needed” to do in as I was running out of days of the year. I made the further mistake of starting up a couple of series that would require more work and didn’t publish stuff I had already written to focus on the series. Finally, I was stressing myself out with trying to time the reviews so my rapidly approaching 500th review would be something memorable.
So I’ve definitely got my New Year’s Resolution sorted for me. No more worrying about what movie is celebrating its whatever anniversary and syncing reviews to topical events and that kind of stuff. I’m also likely to start using less imagery in each post – I’ve slowly gone from 140-character reviews with 1 still to hundreds of words and as many as 10 pictures per review, not to mention trailers, posters, schema, database info, quotes, Representation Test, Bechdel Test for EVERY post. It’s too much.
So to get back on track and build up some momentum again, I’m going to just knock out some 140 character reviews and fill in with full reviews. You’ll start to notice that some of the reviews seem out of time, like the reviews that I wrote for major anniversaries but never published or completed in time. Tough.
“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow”…
