writing

After getting back from Eurogamer and going from holiday mode into “holy shit why do so many people want to buy televisions” mode I kind of shut down on the writing front; both on my two current writing “projects” and here on my blog. One kind of begets the other as the blog acts as both a vent and a starter handle, for want of better terms, as I can blow off steam here or get something off my chest in a casual way, which leads me to be more productive writing my other stuff, which I tend to need to be more disciplined to write. Sort of. I intend to get both going again as the new year kicks off, which anyone who visits here will have already seen over the past week with my most elaborate and long running game of the year feature I’ve ever done, here or anywhere else. My game of the year musings generated a lot more traffic to my blog than I’ve been used to since I used to write for actual websites, whether that’s just because people love to see opinion lists or because I am starting to get a little bit of attention, it has acted as a kickstart to me wanting to take this blog a little more seriously. So I just wanted take some time and use this post to outline a few things I’ll be doing on the blog side of things going forward, both for your benefit and to give me something to fall back on should I lose perspective. 

What I Thought: I’ll be keeping this going, as it tends to be one of my most read set of posts, though I plan to expand this to encompass things that aren’t games. As I’ve mentioned several times I don’t write down detailed opinions on every game I play, only those which provoke strong reactions one way or another. In 2013 you saw anger, confusion, joy and awesomeness and this year you’ll no doubt see more as I dive headfirst into as many games as I can get my hands on.

What I intend to do is also start writing opinions on movies, books and TV shows to try and keep the content coming. What I Thought posts are the easiest things to write as there is already a premise in-built into the post, I played X game and here are my thoughts on it, but there are no major games releases in January. My weekly excursions to the cinema and rapidly expanding Blu-ray collection mean that expanding my opinion posts into movies will be easy and I definitely want to make this blog a little less one-dimensional. Books are also another avenue I’ll want to explore writing about, though I imagine that’ll definitely come less frequently as I can be a slow reader and don’t read as many books as I would prefer. Writing about TV is a former semi-professional hobby of mine though, again, it’ll probably happen with less frequency as with movies and games as I’m not going to turn this blog into the AV Club and start writing about every episodes of every TV show I watch.

Tidbits: I tried this out as a one-off style post last year and it worked really well for me. One of the things that stalls a lot of my blog posts is that I can easily sum up my thoughts in a couple of tweets and inevitably attempt to pad my thoughts, feelings and ideas into something a lot longer than I need to in order to fit it into a full length blog post. So expect to see more posts that cover a few topics in a single post when I don’t have a great deal to say but still want to get things across.

Opinions: The whole reason I started this blog was so I had a place on the Internet to put forward my opinions about stuff, like my musings on Xbox Live a few months ago. I already have a few posts in the chamber once I finish writing them down.

Lists: Probably the easiest thing to write is a good list. Shit, look at my game of the year list, it didn’t take me too long to write a list of games that I really enjoyed from last year, and it was actually an enjoyable experience for me. Which leads to my last paragraph…

The next few weeks: I enjoyed writing my game of the year list that I have already written out another list for my movies of 2013, which I’ll be posting in a few days. It won’t be anything hugely elaborate and I’ll probably contain it to a single post. I also have some stuff that I wrote months ago that I’ll post in the coming weeks. I also have some thoughts on The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a book that was highly recommended to me by a few people, that I want to get out there.

So yeah, this was really just a personal exercise more than anything else, something to focus me on what I want to do with my blog. Whether it’s something anyone actually wanted to read or not I’ll leave up to people who aren’t me. Really it was just a note to say that the blog isn’t going dead just because the game of the year list is over, like it did last year, and hopefully whoever I attracted to my personal thought space with my list will stick around for the ramblings that follow.

🙂