100wordanime

Having reached the one year point, I’ve decided to spend this week reflecting on what I’ve learned from blogging over the past 12 months, firmly keeping in mind I still have a lot to learn.

Interaction

We’ve reached the last post of the anniversary. If you missed any of the follower features or what I learned posts please check them out here. It has been a great week reflecting on the blog and where I’m going. It has also been great hearing from my followers about their own experiences with blogging.

Onto the last post of What I’ve Learned and I save the best for last: Interaction.

I’ve said so many times that one of the main reasons I started the blog, other than to get writing again, was to have someone to talk to about anime. To be a part of a community that appreciated anime and wanted to dissect it, praise it, criticise it, mock it, have fun with it, fall in love, fall out of love, and go through the whole process again during the next season. It is incredibly fun to swap ideas and thoughts with others and the people I’ve met since starting the blog are the reason the blog has kept going and will continue to exist.

Blogging isn’t a one way street. You don’t just write the post, publish it, and wait for all the readers to swarm in and tell you how amazing the post is. If I’m posting about Attack on Titan season 2, then I am reading what others are writing about it and engaging them in a discussion, I’m following comments on Twitter, I’m laughing at screen captures or wincing if someone caught the moment Mike… Poor guy. Whichever way, I’m looking for a discussion. I’m not just throwing my post up there and waiting. That kind of defeats the purpose of joining a community if you are just going to throw a comment out there and then walk away.

As part of building ongoing interactions I try very hard to ensure I visit the blogs of anyone who comments on one of my posts as my first priority when I log on in the morning. Next I hit up the reader and I used to open every single post that had come out from people I followed from the day before, however time constraints sometimes prevent me getting to every post from people I’m following (particularly if something happened the day before and I didn’t read as many posts then as I probably should have).

When I have free time I type the titles of anime I’m currently blogging about into the reader to see who else is tagging posts with these. This is the main way I come across new and fairly cool blogs to read. I don’t comment on every post I read and I don’t like every post I read. When I like a post it is because I had fun reading it or find it informative, insightful or interesting (all the good ‘in’ words really). If I have something I want to say then I’ll comment. I really try to avoid commenting just for the sake of it and I’ve regularly started writing a comment, realised I’m saying nothing and delete it, settling for a like instead. There’s certainly posts where I just read them and walk away.

I think it is really important to be genuine in your online interactions (though some degree of tact is probably needed as well). If you want to be a part of the community you need to contribute to it, you need to value the contributions of others, and more importantly, you need to just be involved.

I’ve met some incredibly cool people in the year I’ve been blogging. I may not know their real names or faces, but I know how they feel about different genres of anime, who their anime crushes are, and what their likely reaction to a new title is going to be. More importantly, I value their opinions and I know that even if we disagree, we’ll have fun talking about it. I truly value the interactions and discussions I’ve had since starting this blog and as this is my final post for the anniversary series I do want to send out one more big thank-you to all the followers.

What I learned from blogging this year is that the online anime community is alive and thriving and being a part of it can be an incredible experience (just know that every community has one or two issues).

I did ask this in my first anniversary post, but I do want to continue to give back to the anime community and create even more interactions between people. That is partly why I run the In Case You Missed It posts on Monday and also why I decided as part of my anniversary to feature some of my followers, but I’m open to other suggestions of ways I can make my blog a bit more welcoming and interactive. Share your thoughts?

Are you a fan of 100WordAnime.blog?

If you like this site and you like what I do, consider becoming a patron.

Thanks,

Karandi James.

Having reached the one year point, I’ve decided to spend this week reflecting on what I’ve learned from blogging over the past 12 months, firmly keeping in mind I still have a lot to learn.

Finding Time

“You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.”

I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that and what makes it more frustrating is it is absolutely correct. We get 24 hours in a day, no more and no less. It is the same 24 hours everyone has. The only thing that changes is how we use them. I know that some people in the real world consider a lot of what I do wasting time. Hours of my life poured into watching movies, TV series, anime, playing computer games, reading blogs and articles online, and now writing my own blog. Though I don’t see that time as wasted. That is what I do to relax, to take a break from the clutter of everything else. It isn’t an escape from reality. It is my version of kicking a football or going out for a drink. It is just what I like to do.

And because I like to do it, I make the time for it. My work schedule is hectic, I actually do have family, friends and a life off line (even if sometimes I find it tiring), and I don’t neglect that in favour of my blog and other hobbies. Rather I ensure that I prioritize and timetable so that work gets done, human interaction occurs and people in the real world don’t wonder if I’m passed out at my computer, and I still have time for relaxing. Admittedly, I get a few extra hours on most people due to my terrible sleeping patterns (though this only holds up for so long before I crash for a day or two to catch up and reset).

What is important is I don’t feel I have to defend my time watching anime or blogging. I’m very open with telling people when I go home I plan to binge half a season of whatever and then write a couple of posts. They tell me they are going to the gym or to the pub or wherever and I see no real difference.

So here’s a better quote for you that applies regardless of your hobby:

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

Essentially, do what makes you happy and don’t waste time feeling guilty over it. That doesn’t mean you can shirk all human interactions and responsibilities. But it does mean that once you’ve taken care of those, the rest of the time is yours to do with what you will.

Of course this leads me to my two main issues with finding time: writing tired and writing wired.

Writing tired is self-explanatory. When I’ve worked 60+ hours that week (not the usual but happens more often than I would like – because let’s face it, no one actually likes working a 60 hour week) and when I’m travelling and staying with family or friends and getting in some of that human interaction, sometimes I am extremely tired but posts don’t write themselves. I try to deal with a lot of this through careful scheduling but that only gets you so far before you are in a position of being tired and still having to write (or pass for the day on new content which hasn’t yet happened though there were one or two posts over the last year that I probably should have scrapped due to quality issues).

My other issue is writing wired. Nervous energy and excitement, adrenaline going, and unable to sit still for whatever reason. Usually because I’m over tired or over caffeinated. It doesn’t lead to good writing and some of my ramblier posts are probably a direct result of my being really wound up and needing to get up and move and instead I insisted on trying to write.

In both of these cases, I do have time to write, but not the disposition. Scheduled posts help overcome this but basically when tired I try to motivate myself and when wired, well I make a note to carefully edit the post later because I’ve had some really interesting rants typed up that have later been hacked to pieces into something that is kind of publishable.

Over to all you bloggers out there: how do you work with finding time?

Are you a fan of 100WordAnime.blog?

If you like this site and you like what I do, consider becoming a patron.

Thanks,

Karandi James.

Having reached the one year point, I’ve decided to spend this week reflecting on what I’ve learned from blogging over the past 12 months, firmly keeping in mind I still have a lot to learn.

Details

There are lots of details in blogging. Whether it is knowing what your focus is, getting the schedule write, sorting your grammar and spelling (I should work a bit harder on this one occasionally, typos creep in especially when I’m tired), responding to other blog posts, etc, etc. Fortunately I like details and tracking things so I get on fairly well with this aspect of it.

But that’s not what I wanted this post to be about. Really, this post is about knowing what details to include in a post and what to leave out. For me, this has become a major challenge over the year mostly because I gave myself the 100 word target* for episode reviews. It means I am supposed to try to get to the point quickly and not just run over an episode synopsis (freely admit I don’t always succeed at that).

So when writing about a single episode, I usually try to focus on one point from the episode. What really stood out as good, bad, weird, potentially important, completely useless, etc? There are plenty of episode summaries around so I really don’t want to just recap the events, and I don’t have the words for it anyway, so my goal is to express how I felt about the episode as a whole and use 1 or 2 incidents to illustrate that point. Again, I don’t always succeed.

However, when I expand this same view onto my full reviews, I find it really helps to take a lot of clutter out of series reviews. Really, you could write thousands of words about a series, but what does someone thinking about watching the show really need to know? What are the points that really stuck with me and how did they make me feel? I openly admit I rarely do any detailed discussion of the animation or artwork (occasionally make passing comments about whether I liked it or not) because I don’t have the skill set to really go into any more depth. The main focus for me are the characters and the plot and whether these are entertaining or not. Certainly other aspects like the animation or the music will get a mention, but they aren’t my primary focus so I don’t spend a lot of time on them.

Even with characters, I try not to list every single character in the show but rather try to narrow my focus to the couple that are needed to illustrate whatever point I’m trying to make about the characters. I regularly end up deleting entire paragraphs about some side character because when drafting I got onto a bit of a rant and then I realised it had no impact on my overall enjoyment of the series and wasn’t worth wasting my reader’s time on.

I’m still working on this, particularly in my episode reviews, but I like to think I’m mostly getting better. I actually struggle with shows that are watchable but unremarkable because I can’t usually find something to focus my post on (The Laughing Salesman is this season’s challenge as there’s a lot of same-same each episode making it hard to write).

Anyway, I’d love to know how you decide which details to keep in posts and which to delete?

*If you are wondering why the 100 word target, it was something to get me writing. I’d gotten to the point where I avoided writing with excuses like I don’t have the time (not reviews, just writing in general). However, by asking myself to write just 100 words and reminding myself how easy it was to get to 100 words I found motivation to start writing again. Now I just need to figure out how to hit the brakes and not smash the 100 word limit on every single episode review.

Are you a fan of 100WordAnime.blog?

If you like this site and you like what I do, consider becoming a patron.

Thanks,

Karandi James.