Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Temporarily(?) Closed For Business

In what is probably not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention the last few months, I decided today to suspend posting on this blog indefinitely.

The funny thing is, it's actually a surprise to me. I had two unfinished drafts sitting on my panel, and one of them was only started on Monday. It was a potentially good post - the first part of a series, in fact - on a topic that interests me. I had already been researching it last week.

...And I realized today that I didn't care. No, I still care about the topic, and the research I was doing. I just didn't care if I ever finished the post, or any of the subsequent posts that would need to be written.

Do you remember the tribute post I did about Casey Kasem in June? The link to the story on the Xenorama Facebook page got picked up by Facebook's Trending Topics. Its reach is 38,368 people, it has been liked by 102 people, and it has been shared 20 times. Impressive! But the actual blog entry - the thing I wrote - only has 310 views. That's less than 1% of the people who saw the Facebook link.

I keep deleting things I've written because it sounds like I'm whining. I never expected much of a readership when I started this blog, and I'm surprised I ever found one at all. It's just that I've been doing this for awhile, and my enthusiasm for writing most of the content here has been wavering. If there's not an audience for it, and I'm not feeling it, it seems kind of silly to keep going.

I don't know, five and a half years sounds like a good run for a blog to me. I've had a lot of fun here. But there comes a time when you have to know when to move on, and I have the sneaking suspicion this is that time for this blog. It was difficult to end the fanzine and the message board that were the previous incarnations of OWARI. It was difficult to abandon the LiveJournal that had been my blogging headquarters since 2003. Heck, it was hard to close the books on Return of Jetman in December and Pictures of Naomi Morinaga in March (I don't think I ever mentioned the closing of the latter, but yeah, it's done). I just think maybe I should be looking in different directions.

To be clear, I'm not disappearing. Ohhhhhh no, far from it. You can still find me on:

Twitter

Tumblr

I'm also still fighting the good fight of remembering Rene Bond at Rene Bond Tribute (220 Likes strong!) and still posting images related to movie serials (sometimes only tangentially) at Continued Next Week! (currently at 145 followers!).

There are also preliminary plans for something "major" to come down the line at some point. When? I have no idea right now. Keep your eyes open on Twitter and Tumblr, and all should be revealed... one day.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's to never rule out anything. With that in mind, I'm not ruling out this blog making a thrilling comeback someday. I'm not even ruling out a random post or two straggling into publication when it's least expected. But if this really is "the end" for OWARI, I want to at least acknowledge it, and say thank you to all of you who have been reading and commenting over the years.

Remember, it's not "Goodbye," just "See you around!"

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Wringing Out Writing

It's not exactly news that my work has been suffering. I'm not going to go into what I perceive as the reasons why; I only want to talk about the work unfinished, and my thoughts on that. Forgive me if I'm forgetting something. I'm prone to do these things.

There was supposed to be a novella called CAPTAIN SATELLITE: LIFE & TIMES in 2012. Well, I think I've discussed the fact that I put that project on the shelf due to some flaws in my outline. Unfortunately, though I still would very much like to complete this story, it just hasn't happened. Part of that is due to the fact that CAPTAIN SATELLITE: NUMBER ZERO didn't even live up to my modest hopes for it, but really, it's just that I have not given the task of fixing the story's problems the attention it deserves.

Interestingly, I have considered extracting the first chapter of the novella (which IS finished) and publishing it on the blog. It can more or less function as a standalone piece, so this isn't as outrageous as it sounds. It would at least be something, and maybe it would drive me to finish the story. That would be nice.

There is/was another Owariverse tale that was promised - gosh, I am not even sure when now. It is an Ultimate American story, and I literally just found the file for it. I last modified it in March. Gads. Finding where that was going again may take some work. It's a clever idea, with some fun bad accent work, so I'd like to add it to the mythos.

Finally, we come to the untitled story that appeared here for two consecutive days back in April. It was a more down-to-Earth thing, and it felt like it had some immediacy. That reaaaaally ground to a halt, as an incomplete draft for "Chapter 3" has been sitting in my queue for months. Given the apparent lack of interest in this story continuing, maybe it will stay there. I don't regret trying to do a change-of-pace, but there is the question as to whether it succeeded or failed.

At some point, things are bound to get better. But I have to recapture the magic, and it's not as easy as just saying it's going to happen.