It’s Not a New Year’s Resolution

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I’ve never been one for big goals or long term planning – usually I make my goals too large and ultimately unattainable, so after a couple weeks of enthusiasm I spend the remaining months feeling terrible about my inability to stick to a plan. But that doesn’t mean that I find intention-setting to be a fruitless venture and though I don’t want to let my writing stagnate due to a complete lack of forward momentum that I could have addressed, so here I am with some thoughts about the general direction of this blog, my writing, and my general anime fandom as we enter the cusp of the transitioning year.

I’m going to be laying out few concrete goals here; concrete goals are historically what I’ve been unable to meet, and I don’t want to set myself up for easily-defined failure. But at my day job the management is sort of enamored with an idea called “Start, Stop, or Continue,” in which the person participating in the exercise, annual review, or whatever, defines the actions that they’d like to start, stop, or continue going forward. I’ve found that to be a more helpful way of framing things in my life, so despite the fact that I find the professional world to be a little bit jargon-y and silly at times, I feel that in this case at least its heart is in the right place.

Start

I’ve been writing about anime since around Spring of 2007. I first started out on my personal LiveJournal, then I partnered with a friend who came up with the S1E1 domain and branding. I’ve used Blogger, Moveable Type, and now, having taken full control of the domain and website responsibilities, I’m now happily entrenched in the world of WordPress blogging. I’ve had the good fortune to be welcomed by several other anime bloggers and feel that I’m in very good company where I am right now. I’ve told myself numerous times that this is enough; I’m not a professional writer and in fact have a very good day job that I enjoy. That said, over the past year I’ve come to realize that as much as I enjoy what I’m doing right now, it actually isn’t enough.

I have what I’d deem a kind of “complex” surrounding being given proper credit for my own ideas. Sometimes this is just me being immature about the fact that sometimes an observation is obvious enough that multiple people might make the same one, but in other cases I feel a little bit more justified. I recall a time many years ago, when I was living in a small apartment near the downtown area of the city where I’m still a resident, that I had the thought to do a second Thanksgiving celebration with local friends. An acquaintance at the time basically told me that I couldn’t expect to handle that type of event in my tiny apartment, and maybe they could take over and hold it at their house. Since then, it’s become a huge annual event, and this acquaintance has been celebrated for it. That shit was my idea! Even though I’ve since disconnected from that group for various reasons and managed to live my life pretty well since, it’s stuff like that which still manages to make my irrationally salty from time-to-time.

While this situation might not seem to directly relate to anything here at the blog, it actually holds more weight than one might expect. I think I’ve done some good writing here, especially over the past year; I’ve gotten some thoughtful comments and more page views than in past years, which is certainly a measure of success in its own right. But I’ve realized that something I really value is being noticed (in a positive way!), and while I have been noticed to some extent taking the same actions I’ve been taking all along, there are things I can do more actively to put my words in front of more people.

So that said, I do have a couple of things I’d like to start doing going forward. The first is to interact more online in general – I am pretty terrible at liking and commenting on others’ work even when I enjoy what they’re writing, so I feel like I can’t expect to rake in the kudos until I start putting in more of a good faith effort to reciprocate.

The other thing I’d like to do is to start pitching ideas to outside anime websites. Some of you may not know this, but over the years I’ve written for a couple of other fandom websites, at least in a limited capacity. In those cases I wasn’t really as mature a writer or a person, so I kind of ended up flaking out after my feelings of inadequacy ended up catching up with me. Because of this I’ve kept away from trying to do more of this in the ensuing years. I’ve told myself that it was just my brain protecting me from screwing up again, but as I’ve come to understand my penchant for self-sabotage and low self-esteem, I realize that these thoughts are not reality and that there are steps I can take to prevent myself from sabotaging myself into oblivion again.

One other thing that’s been holding me back is that I’ve struggled with feeling like I don’t have a unique perspective on anime or anime fandom. I watched part of Anime Lockdown in 2021 (an online-only anime convention that drew some pretty big names and some great panel offerings), and asked Lynzee Loveridge (Executive Editor at ANN) what she looked for in pitches to the site. Her answer essentially boiled down to “show me something I’ve never seen before.” This answer makes a lot of sense – I’m sure she and her staff see the same things, day in and day out, and in a world and fandom with so many different possible perspectives, they would rather feature ideas that are new and diverse. Of course, my brain immediately made this all about me and I struggled with the idea that I simply don’t have anything unique to offer.

Now that I’ve had several months to sit with this idea, I think the reality is that actually we all have unique perspectives to offer, it’s more a matter of disentangling our minds from what we believe we’re supposed to be thinking and saying, and becoming better acquainted with ourselves as beings whose true ideas are molded by the sum total of our experiences. It’s simply (albeit not simple) a matter of having the time, resources, and enough self-reflection to be able to do that – which can be a tall order.

On a more personal note, I want to feel relevant to people in my life again. I used to be a go-to person when it came to anime; most of my friends would come to me to ask about my opinions on new anime series. Now I get the impression that the majority of people I know in real life don’t ever read my writing, and it’s been ages since anyone’s really come to me with questions about the fandom in which I’m still deeply entrenched and knowledgeable. Part of this, again, is just my poor ability to interact with people, and these couple of pandemic years have definitely not helped with that in any way whatsoever. I’ve also long since suspected various… neuro-diverse traits about myself so I know this is partly just emotional sensitivity related to that – simply a constant sense of feeling left-out and being an afterthought in others’ lives, when in fact that might not be entirely the case. Whatever might be going on, I would like to both reaffirm the value I believe there to be in my own writing, and perhaps in doing so get some credit for it among people I know (which I realize is petty… but I’m allowing myself a little pettiness here and there, as a treat).

So, in short, I would like to start pitching my essay ideas to larger anime websites. My goal is modest – I want to propose one pitch this year, just one; I feel like that’s attainable for me. I don’t even need for it to be accepted anywhere, I just want to be able to say that I’ve done it and then see how things go from there.

In more concretely site-related stuff, I would like to start pre-planning my writing schedule, including any hiatuses. I’m fully aware that life happens and that it might not be reasonable to expect myself to know about real-world situations with enough lead time to say “hey, there won’t be any postings this week,” but in a lot of cases I know when I’ll be busy with other things and won’t have time to write. It just looks more professional, in my opinion, to notify readers ahead of time if that’s at all a possibility.

One last thing I’d like to do is to start adding different types of posts. Right now my writing boils down to a couple of different general types:

• First episode impressions
• Essays about specific series
• Essays about specific aspects of fandom

I’ve dabbled in episode reviews in the past, and while I don’t think I really want to do weekly reviews of currently-airing series (at least on my own; if someone wanted to partner up I’d be interested in giving that a try), I’ve enjoyed looking back at older series and analyzing them with the benefit of hindsight. I’m also not a huge fan of “listicle” type lists which purport to rank shows based on some arbitrary ranking system, but I do enjoy the sort of lists that compile anime together based on their shared traits rather than on a “best-of” system. I also used to write a lot of posts defining anime-related terms and I’d like to do more scholarly things like that.

Whatever I end up doing, I think picking up different types of posts will both make scheduling things easier (for example, Fridays might be reserved for less weighty items, because who wants to read some downer personal essay at the end of the work week? lol), as well as help me stretch my writing muscles a bit.

Somewhat related to this point is the fact that I simply want to be better-researched in what I write and say. This is a bit of a tall order – anyone can have an opinion on something, but it’s much more difficult to have an informed opinion, especially when there are various barriers to accessing good, academic information in many cases. I’ve been working to find ways to address this and hope to do so more going forward.

Stop

There are a few things that I’m doing now that would probably be a good idea to stop or at least greatly curtail going forward.

The first is a biggie; I want to try to stop comparing my writing to what other people are producing – content-wise, schedule-wise, and in any other category that I may be overlooking. This is a tall order and I don’t know how successful I’ll be in attempting this; it honestly goes against my very nature as someone who feels surrounded by very gifted and successful people. But I know it’s unhelpful, because as they say, comparison is the thief of joy. I’m me; I’m the only person who has my ideas and writes the way that I do. And that is enough.

I also want to stop trying to adhere to a “one post per day” schedule during “first impression” season. The reason I started doing this is because I started to feel bad posting a few times per day during the initial seasonal rush period and then having gaps in my schedule after a couple of weeks. The thing is… people aren’t that interested in first impressions after that initial two-to-three-week period, because by that point they’ve likely already used other resources to choose their seasonal watch schedule. While as a one-person show I don’t know that I can keep the same sort of schedule that sites such as ANN or Anime Feminist are able to maintain, I want to try a little harder to be timely and relevant (thus helping to address some of the issues mentioned earlier) and thus also give myself some more leeway to write more diverse posts after the rush period. But I will give myself the grace to simply finish reviewing all the first episodes, if that’s all I’m able to accomplish at any given time.

Lastly, I want to stop being insulted by constructive criticism. In the past, people have left comments on my writing pointing out spelling errors or grammatical issues (usually a case of re-writing a thought and not removing all the remnants of the previous version – this post is fairly lengthy and probably has one or two of these that no amount of my own editing passes will be able to fully address). In this past, this has annoyed me; if they’ve read the entire piece and seemingly the only reason they’ve commented is to point out an error, then the writing itself must not have been very effective, huh? This is a toxic attitude that I want to leave behind (though I hope people will ultimately find more to comment upon than the stray spelling or grammatical issue!).

Continue

Lastly, there are a few things that I think have been going well and which I don’t really want to change in any substantial manner.

As always, I plan to continue posting first impressions each season, as well as compiling them into seasonal summary link posts for easier access after the fact. While I realize there are many sites (including some of the biggest ones) that do similar first impressions each season, I feel that it’s helpful to my personal enjoyment of the medium to continue this kind of writing so I don’t want to stop even though it definitely takes some time and effort to complete. Even if I don’t fully achieve my goals of being quicker on the output, I’ll continue writing these first impressions no matter what.

I will also continue writing series reviews my own way. This past year I haven’t posted very many of them, but I have written about a few anime series in full if I feel they’ve warranted some further comment or they’ve inspired me to want to write about them. I don’t offer letter grades or numerical scores (because I feel like those don’t do a good job of saying anything about the content of a series), but I do focus on the themes and ideas in the anime that I write about and I think that must be valuable to someone, somewhere (it’s definitely more valuable to me).

I also want to continue some of the things I’ve dropped, specifically the book club reviews of Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Mononoke. While I think the “book club” format itself is long dead (mostly because getting other people to want to participate in actually discussing the series in question was a losing battle from the absolute get-go), I’d like to pay respects to the people who were actually reading them and I’d personally just like to get back to them (at least with Mononoke, which I’ve let languish due to the fact that I had an additional thought about one of the earlier story arcs but haven’t felt especially capable of writing that thought down until recently).

Ultimately, I simply want to continue continuing. This past year has been tough – perhaps even tougher to handle than 2020 turned out to be. I think many of us are suffering a form of collective trauma, just surviving in a world that’s revealed itself even more as being particularly hostile and trying to ensure our own health and the health of our loved ones. I think that the fact that I managed to write anything this year is its own form of small victory, and in that light I think what I’ve managed to accomplish is pretty remarkable. So, in the face of any other setbacks, I just want to keep trying my best.

Thanks for reading; I hope your holiday is pleasant (if you celebrate anything this time of year) and that the new year holds positive things in store for you!