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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

Passion

The third thing I have learned from blogging over the last 12 months is that regardless of the quality of someone’s writing, what I find most interesting is reading the posts of someone who is passionate about the topic. That doesn’t mean they are raving fanatic unwilling to listen to other view points, but that they really and sincerely want to talk about an anime or something and that desire to share their thoughts and ideas just shines through.

There’s all different ways to write about and to review anime. You can take a heavy analytical approach, an entirely how you felt or reacted approach, listing positives and negatives, comparisons to other anime, giving a score out of ten or whatever, and so on and so forth. None of these have more merit than any other as far as I can tell because I’ll read one post on one site and another that uses the same approach on another but enjoy one more than the other because of the writer’s voice. When reading if it feels like I’m actually hearing that person and understanding how they felt about something or how they saw it, then I enjoy reading it more and want to take part in that conversation.

And that’s something I want to continue working on with 100 Word Anime. I started the blog to engage in conversations about anime and I am loving that aspect of blogging. I want my passion for the topic to come across when I write but I also want to add something meaningful to the conversation rather than just being more noise in cyberspace. To be honest, I don’t think I’m where I want to be with that yet. Some posts I feel are getting close to where I want them but others are too reactionary or I swing too far the other way an I feel my voice gets lost because I’ve tried to be more analytical. That said, having gone back through some of my earlier posts (for my feature on Friday where I look at how the blog started out), I am definitely happy with the progress I have made in writing this year.

This one was a shorter post than the previous lessons learned, but while it is short, I think this is one of the most important things I’ve been thinking about in regards to improving my blog overall (without adding to the content at this point).

What are your thoughts on this? How do you get your voice across?

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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.

Scheduling

Scheduling is probably the most important thing for me when it comes to keeping my blog going and running smoothly (or as close to smoothly as it can get). There are two reasons I am a huge fan of scheduling.

01. I have days where I work 11 – 12 hours. That isn’t every day but it happens more often than I would like and on those days, I’m not writing. If I even get to read other people’s blogs and the comments on mine on those days, I’m pretty happy. Outside of that, I just work long weeks (standard is between 50 – 60 hours depending on what is happening) so my blog has to work around that, plus there are times when you get sick, are tired, or just not feeling the whole writing thing. That’s life. It happens. But if you haven’t scheduled posts when you were feeling like writing and had the time to do it, what it means is your blog goes quiet for days at a time. I know that even missing a day of visiting blogs that I comment on hits the view count on my blog. I know this from days when I was too busy or too sick to do anything with the blog and I watch the stats fall over the next couple of days even though I still have posts going out – which I guess is why anyone is still visiting. If your goal is to build a blog, letting your blog go quiet is not a great idea.

02. The second reason I am a big fan of scheduling is because of the WordPress reader. It is still my biggest referrer for visitors and by posting regular content spread throughout a day you show up in the reader more than once catching different people in different parts of the world who are checking the reader at different times. Also, if you want multiple posts in a day and you post them all at once, mostly people just skim over you in the reader anyway. So using scheduling to your advantage and getting your blog seen can be really helpful.

I mentioned it in my post on content, but I am really big on planning things out on paper. I have a notebook ruled into columns with the days of the week and the dates running down one side and space for the names of posts, the episodes numbers that I’m up to, and everything else to be filled in. Once I plan to write a post I lightly write it in the space. Once I’ve drafted the post and scheduled it on WordPress I write over it. In the days leading up to the post going out if it is a feature or a review I do a re-read/re-draft/re-write depending on what the post needs (though this falls down when I get busier and sometimes they get a quick read and edit leading to some interesting typos that probably should have been caught and fixed). Lastly once the post goes out and I’ve checked that it has posted properly, I tick it off my list. Some interesting post errors have occurred where the body of a post has just kind of vanished or only half the post has apparently saved, but these are the exceptions. Most posts go out without an issue.

This system works for me because I don’t post on the day I write. Even episode reviews I try to give a 2 day buffer from viewing to posting. That way I’m not under stress to have to watch an episode the day it comes out (I prefer to so I can comment on other posts) but I don’t have to if I’m busy. I can put it off a day, or sometimes two. I can also rethink my opinion because I usually draft episode review posts immediately after viewing. Sometimes as I think through an episode after, my opinion changes or I reconsider things. That 2 day buffer allows me to turn over all those little thoughts and see if I need to change something. Admittedly, given my episode reviews are just my impressions of the episodes, I seldom change them too much. It is really only the rant like ones that get toned down a bit as I try to moderate the tone just a little.

The posts that get the most reworking are posts for shows I love. Mostly because those posts are the ones I struggle to write with any kind of objectivity (not that any of my posts are actually objective but I usually try to find both positives and negatives and to consider different views). Soul Eater and Yuri on Ice are two reviews I really struggled with writing. The Yuri on Ice review I’m still not happy with and I rewrote that so many times. Eventually however you kind of just have to let it go and accept that the post is what it is and it is time to send it out into the world for others to criticise or enjoy.

Anyway, pretty much I’ve learned that if I want my blog to have regular content and I want that content to be more than just a stream of unedited rambles, I need to plan, draft, schedule, and review posts before they go out, and even then interruptions happen meaning sometimes the review process gets a little sloppy. Also, when most of my viewing and reviewing happens between 4 – 5 in the morning, there are days where even morning people aren’t as alert as they’d like to be at that hour.

What are your thoughts on scheduling? Do you schedule posts or do you post as you go? What system do you find works for you?

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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.

Content

One of the things that kept me from starting a blog even after the idea was suggested to me as a way to get back into writing regularly was a fear I had that I wouldn’t have anything to say. Who wants to read a blog about nothing? And writing words just to fill posts doesn’t seem like the best approach either because it is going to become clear to your audience fairly quickly that even though you produce content, you have nothing to say.

The thing is, once I started the blog, I realised I have too much that I want to say. Every post I write leads me to another idea or another thought I’d love to write about. That doesn’t mean every idea is a gem or well received, but there’s always something I want to say. Most days I post 3 posts fairly consistently, though the current Spring season has me posting four posts some days because I didn’t drop enough shows and I’m a little overloaded at the moment.

While I’ll address this more in scheduling, since starting the blog I’ll regularly schedule a feature or a top 5 or even a series review and then some other inspiration will hit me which leads me to either move the original post back (if it is time sensitive like some features are) or trying to think when the new post would best fit into the overall schedule. The end result is a very messy notebook full of scribbles and arrows and a constant weighing up of which posts need to go out sooner rather than later and which posts are even ready to actually go out.

There are a couple of things that really help me with content.

01. I watch a lot of anime. You can’t write about anime without engaging with anime. That one should be a no-brainer except that a lot of bloggers struggle with balancing watching anime against writing about anime because essentially the more time given to one is time taken from the other.

02. I read a lot of other blogs and articles about anime. Once again, you have to engage with anime and the opinions of others on anime and just find out what is out there that you might have missed. My watch list of anime to eventually catch up on was already crazy, since blogging I threw the list out and started over and it still manages to get longer almost daily as I find another review about an anime I hadn’t heard about. Plus, with all the seasonal watching I do, catch up views kind of get sandwiched in whenever I have the time.

03. I write lists. I’m old school in that my desk is literally covered in notebooks. One for my blog schedule, one for ideas for features (if I’m watching an anime and have a question it gets written down, if a random thought strikes me while writing or reading another post I write it down, etc), one for ideas for possible top 5 lists, one for shows I’m looking forward to in later seasons, one for shows I’m wanting to watch and shows I’ve watched but not yet reviewed, one for computer game reminders, etc. I’m literally drowning in notebooks with at least nine within sight and reach of me right now and if I get a sudden idea I grab a pen and whatever notebook is appropriate that instant because ideas have a tendency to run away again. With that in mind, when I get a window of time to write, I always have a lot of things to write about, the problem is narrowing it down to what will actually go well.

That said, I am cutting down my series reviews. I was reviewing a series every 3 days (I know, weird scheduling choice given it means it isn’t the same day in each week but it was working) but going forward, after the 21st, I will only be reviewing whole series on Saturday and Wednesday. Partly this is to make scheduling a little simpler and partly it is because while I still have a lot of series on my list to review, the list is significantly shorter than it was and I am starting to think more long term about my blog (which is something that never occurred to me back in May last year when I didn’t actually think long term was going to be an issue).

The other thing about content that I’m slowly getting my head around is how many non-anime related posts I can throw out there on an anime blog. They are fun to write but I don’t want my blog to become unfocused so trying to balance that content is another consideration going forward. As well as the question of whether I should introduce any other weekly articles.

So, content?

I’d love to know my readers’ opinions about the content on 100 Word Anime. What you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like more of, what you would like me to hit with a shovel and bury in the backyard (metaphorically of course). Please comment below.

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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.