Hello everyone,
Let's have some different post today and let's talk about the common enemy of anime and VN bloggers, an enemy that affect all kind of blogs (Editorials, Episodics, Reviews) with maybe the exception of the "news" related one.
The blogger category most hit is definitely the one where the blogger do episodic posting for many series every season ending up creating a routine where you expect to write a post in a periodic manner.
Yes, I'm talking about the dread "wednesday" effect that appear every season and has no mercy for any of us. What is the "wednesday effect" you ask? Before explaining in detail, let's go and analyze what we do every season before starting to blog...
There are many philosophies involved in choosing a series to cover in an anime blog. There are some bloggers that bases their series coverage even before actually watching one episode using trailers and information on the net as a basis for their reasoning (like what they do on RandomC).
There are some others like me that watch all the first/second episode of all the series and then decide what to cover depending on the level of enjoyment given by each series in the season.
Regardless of the way choosen, we all end up with a number of series we decided to cover in a regular manner that create in us some sort of weekly schedule of posts that should continue for the whole duration of the season...
Unfortunately our expectations while watching a series may wane during time due to many reasons (poor content, lack of direction in the story, bad visual quality) and may force us to decide whether to drop or not a particular series.
This is when the "wednesday" effect appear. You are faced with the choice of continue to blog the series you aren't enjoying anymore (to keep consistency in your blog) or drop it altogether ending up creating a hole in your otherwise perfect schedule.
Generally the hole is more likely to appear in days where the number of shows to cover is extremely low, like exactly is "wednesday" this season.
I saw over the course of the years many bloggers following either way to resolve the issue. I appreciate the professionality of the ones who keep consistency and blog about a series till the very end, no matter how much they're going to hate it.
I'm, by the way, a proud member of the "let's drop it" faction. The problem now is, what to do if you end up dropping a series or two in the middle of an anime season?
Will you live with the hole in the middle of the week screwing up all your plans? Will you try covering something else that you ignored till now?
In my rather short blog career (I'm near to be 10 months old), I tried all three way and found myself without a real solution to apply in every case.
I found that continuing to blog about a series you hate is extremely painful and start to make the blogging hobby more like a work and that's definitely something I don't suggest to anyone!
On the other side, leaving a day without doing anything makes me feel like I've been slacking too much and neglecting the blog.
I tried to cover some series I ignored in the past, but I felt bad jumping in the middle of the season on a new series. It's like entering a bus when you clearly see that is already completely full...
In the end, my solution has been creating this post today and in general, these recurring editorial posts, and you?
What do you do to fill in the gaps in your anime/VN blogging schedule? You leave the gap behind? You fill it in with some other series? You never drop a series?
See you soon,
feal87
P.S. A thanks to marthaurion that unwittingly gave me the idea to write this post. :P