The Review Writing Process

When one is a blogger, it’s natural that from time to time one blogs about blogging. I’m fairly sure any writer periodically thinks about the writing process itself. And being a blogger leads to being part of blogging communities, which in turn leads to discussions about blogging. It’s all very circular.

As I am mostly a movie blogger, and read movie blogs, one of the questions I see come up often is how we all go about writing our reviews. I’ve generally just given a few short lines, but I thought I’d do a full post on my process here. People might find it interesting, and other bloggers might find it useful — or have suggestions that I’ll find useful. Either is good.

Index Up

No major article today, just a small announcement of a new addition to the site. The announcement is small because the work to make the addition wasn’t, and I ran out of time to do any other writing today. But that’s all right.

While I know the majority of readers simply read whatever review is newest, and that’s fine, I wanted to make sure my older reviews were always available and easily accessible — emphasis on “easily”. Sure, you can click the categories page, and that’s fun for haphazard browsing, but if you’re looking for my views on a particular film, or want to look up films from a certain decade, the categories are not particularly convenient.

Apolitical Blues

“Well, my telephone is ringin’
Only it was Chairman Mao
Just tell him anything
I just don’t wanna talk to him now”
– Van Halen, “Apolitical Blues”

It’s early May, and my voter’s ballot just arrived in the mail (Oregon has statewide vote-by-mail). There’s nothing on the ballot I really want to talk about, but that’s kind of the point. It’s a May election, in an odd-numbered year. Across the U.S. (international readers, don’t worry, though the examples may be from the U.S., the thrust of this isn’t U.S.-centric), people care to some degree about the issues, but it’s unlikely anybody’s getting into a full election-time fervor about it. Politics are vaguely on peoples’ minds, but they aren’t the dominant part of most peoples’ attentions right now.

That makes this a good time for me to talk about politics. Or more precisely, why I don’t generally talk about politics on my blog.

Where I’m At

You may have noticed there have been a couple days I’ve missed updating on lately. Wednesday and Thursday were because my internet connection wasn’t working, Saturday was less of “a mere inconvenience” and more “argh argh ouch”. As I mentioned last Sunday, I have a broken tooth that hasn’t been yanked out yet. The antibiotics were supposed to take the infection level down to a point where I wouldn’t be feeling pain, but apparently they weren’t strong enough. And I’m becoming tolerant to the Vicodin (yes, after a single week; my system adapts fast.) So there have been times when it’s been a little hard to focus on watching a movie, or writing a review of one. And with my sleep disrupted, I’m not always sure just when I’ll be awake; if I can sleep, I’ve generally been doing so.

I’m hoping to get the dentists at the Indian Health Center to yank the bad tooth out Tuesday. We’ll see. I’m aware, though, that when it does finally get taken out, I’m probably still going to be in a fair amount of pain initially (or fogbound with whatever new pain med they give me, assuming it works properly). So there will probably still be a period after that when I’m not at full capacity, but at least I should hopefully be healing, which isn’t going to happen otherwise.

So in the meantime, things are going to be on a sporadic schedule here. I’m going to try to remember to do the MMV and News Bites regardless (though I’m not sure yet if I’ll manage this week’s MMV before I zonk out again). But movie reviews are going to be dependent on when I have a block of time when I don’t have the toothache preventing me from enjoying things. So things might be light on content here for a while. Nothing you all couldn’t figure out by seeing the lack of posts, but I figured I’d give an explanation.

For Your Consideration: 2013 Lammys

The Large Association of Movie Blogs (The LAMB) is once again hosting its annual Lammy Awards, celebrating the best movie blogs in our community. The system is just a little different for the 2013 Lammys, with three different stages to the process. During the first stage, blogs were submitted for eligibility in the various award categories. The second stage is nominations — any active LAMB member may nominate up to five of the eligible blogs in each category. These will then be collated into a small selection (5 or 10 depending on the category) for the final voting.

I realize many of my readers aren’t part of the LAMB and thus won’t be interested, and I apologize to those readers; I’ll get back to the regular content tomorrow (just consider this week’s Wednesday article and Thursday review to have been switched). But for those who are LAMB members, my blog, Morgan on Media (LAMB #1243), has been submitted for eligibility in four different categories (one of them twice). I’d like to thank my friend Will at Silver Emusion for submitting Morgan on Media to a few of the categories; it’s much appreciated.

So, for your consideration, here are the categories that Morgan on Media is eligible to be nominated for:

900 Film Genre Breakdown

As I mentioned in the post-script to my Hobbit review, that film was the 900th feature film that I’ve seen. Or, more precisely, the 900th that I’ve seen and remember clearly enough to have rated on IMDb. There are, no doubt, several films from my youth that I no longer remember clearly, but if it’s something that I’d want to see again as an adult to evaluate, then it doesn’t really count (those that I do remember clearly are rated and counted). And, as stated before in my Reeling in the Years post, I’m only counting those feature-length films that have been released to theatres. Now, I’m waiting for the 1000 mark to do a breakdown of what years I’ve seen, but 900 is good enough to take a look at the genre breakdown.

I’m aware this is something that may be of interest only to me, but what the hey. It’s Sunday, it’s Saint Patrick’s Day, and most movie bloggers are probably watching Fogs torture himself with all the Twilight Movies, so it’s kind of a slow day. Here’s the rundown, using IMDb’s genre categories:

Scheduling and the Monday Music Video

As you have probably noticed, 2013 has been off to a bit of a rough start for me and the blog. I’ve had a few different things interfering with my timeliness, either by limiting my time to write or my energy to do so. I already said I’d be on a more sporadic basis in the meantime and not stressing too much about missing a day or two, but as I was considering whether to write a review for today that would go up at noon, or have it go up tomorrow, I got to thinking about my usual content schedule, and whether there was something I could do to make it a bit easier to keep up on things just a bit. After all, I’m still not going to sweat it if I’m busy working on something else for a day, or if the power cuts out, or Century Link forgets they’re an internet provider or if I’m only getting 10% of the necessary oxygen to my brain, but it would be a little helpful to me to at least formalize the informal posting schedule I’ve had, and to work in a couple more light-weight posts into the mix.

The movie reviews are fun, they’re the reason the blog exists, and they’re probably the main reason most of you are here — though I certainly hope the rest of it is just as interesting, and the response has usually supported that notion. But conservatively, each movie review is a three-hour time commitment, for watching and writing (more if it’s an in-depth review such as the Favorite Films posts). It’s difficult to do that every single day, and even when you work on a buffer, it still amounts to the same. That’s part of why I write the other stuff to begin with — the other part, of course, being that I’m interested in writing it, which should always be reason #1 when blogging.

Update Status

Hey folks. Sorry about the missed updates yesterday and this morning. Long story short, I’m still sick. The cold I started this month with has progressed into a sinus infection, which is as unpleasant as it sounds. It’s been a little difficult to maintain the energy to pay attention to a two-hour movie, let alone write about it afterward. So until I’m able to get this taken care of, updates probably won’t be coming every day.

I don’t want to go on an indefinite hiatus again, though. So for now the game plan is to simply update whenever I’ve got something ready. It’ll be a bit more sporadic than usual, but there will be content off and on. And hopefully I’ll be back to my normal fully-oxygenated self by March.

Brief Update Break

Hi all. Just a quick update on a quick lack of updates, as it were.

I try not to be too obsessive about watching the calendar and clock, but the truth is, I do like to maintain a steady posting schedule. But it’s a lot easier to do that when you have a buffer of posts, and what with running hither and yon shopping for Christmas presents last month, my buffer’s been gone for a while. And while I can (and did) write fast enough to post on the same day as I watch a film, it always feels a bit rushed to me when I do that. I’d prefer to give things time to germinate in my mind so I’m giving things the best review I can, and I can only do that if I have a bit of slack time between when I watch something and when the post has to go up.

Plus, when you’re scrambling to get a post in by an arbitrary self-imposed deadline, it starts feeling like “work” instead of “fun”. And the blog is meant to be fun. I mean, sure, I could crank out some fast review of something right now to meet the midnight deadline for a post, but it wouldn’t be my best work. And I think I should always at least be trying to write good posts if I’m going to be writing.

So since I have some more social stuff going on this week that would continue to make it difficult to both post and rebuild a buffer at the same time, I’m going take a short break from posting. Take “advantage” of the fact that it’s the New Year and it’s an accepted time to take a “vacation” (as odd as it may sound to apply that to a blog). Not too long. Just long enough to take the hurry out of the equation and restore my post buffer. Say about a week or so. EDIT: Looking more like two weeks. Got sick twice during my break.

I’ll still be checking in and replying to comments on existing articles, and reading other people’s blogs and commenting on those. And I’ll still be writing, it’s just that it’ll be going into the buffer instead of getting posted immediately.

Regular service will resume shortly.

Farewell, 2012!

It’s December 31, which means that 2012 has come to a close. Despite a few different choices for the apocalypse, the world did not end — or if it did, nobody noticed. Every indication is that the world will continue to exist next year as well, so before we head into 2013, it’s time for a look back on 2012, as viewed through Morgan on Media.

My blog celebrated its first anniversary back in September, and it’s certainly grown since both this time last year and even since its anniversary. At this time last year, I had reviewed 68 films — including theatrical releases, TV movies, direct-to-video releases, and short films. This year, I nearly tripled that number, reviewing 202 films for a total of 270 since the blog’s inception. 15 of those were Favorite Films reviews — the rest (barring an occasional exception, such as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians) were films I had not seen before. The year began with Cool Hand Luke and ended with Heathers, so while there were definite ups and downs in the middle, it started and ended on strong notes. Overall, I made 328 new posts, roughly six a week — though in truth it was more that after the mid-point of the year I started writing seven days a week, while before it was a little more haphazard. As of this writing, the blog has had exactly 46,000 page views in 2012 (it’ll go up a bit since the year isn’t quite over yet.) Over 10,000 of those were in December alone — though I do expect a bit of a drop-off in January, it’s still nice to compare that to last year, when all four active months combined only added up to 2800 views. But enough of the general stats. Onward for the best and worst of 2012.