Hello,
Let's go talk a bit about another blogger-related topic that may interest non-blogger as well as an insight on the life of anime bloggers in general and a bit more specific on my experience and the challenges I face everyday.
This is another post of the series created while continuing to wait for the start of the winter anime season 2011 in a few days time (I also got the bad news that the 1 hour special of Guilty Crown is probably a big recollection of "the previous events").
Today we'll talk about two of the most important part of a anime bloggers routine. The first is focused on the work routine of a blogger and how a simple routine start to get messy and messy as the months pass making the job of a blogger more complex than they first thought.
The second is the so-called "guiltiness" toward the feeling, that anime bloggers get from time to time, that they're "slacking" compared to what they've done or achieved in the past.
The question we want to ask ourself is "What is the common routine for an anime blogger (in this case me) and how this change during the time?".
When I first started blogging in the January of 2011 almost an year ago (let's call it the first version) posting on this blog was a really easy, fast and painless procedure that took only few minutes to complete. I would search the net for some great wallpapers of a series I liked, creating some thumb for them and I started to write an half assed review smaller than 200 words trying to convey some really "quick" feelings on the series.
This was working fine, but as the time started to pass (February/March 2011) the quantity of content written in each post was slowly growing up, just as the series to review were shrinking more and more making it very difficult to cope up with the pace and routine I created by myself.
This was the second version in which I started doing random impressions over some running anime series (Madoka Magica and Infinite Stratos are probably the most common) and the blog system started to contain detailed descriptions for each and EVERY single wallpaper adding up more workload to the creation of each post.
At this point (Third version in April/May 2011) with the addition of the screenshots functionality, the blog arrived to a point where managing to write two post per day with that kind of size was simply a dream so I decided to move to the actual "one post per day" routine that has been kept up till now.
In these moments I tried to give a second take on the many series reviewed in an half-assed way during the first month and stabilized the size of my posts to be around 500 words (a number that is mostly the same even now in all posts except the editorials)
Since then, the style of the blog has been kept mostly similar with some random addition from time to time making the job longer and more complexier everyday to prepare a single post (adding videos to each episodic, starting to write editorials, doing regular episodics, etc...)
I started from an average of 15/30 minutes per post to a situation now that I take 60/120 minutes to write a single post (depending on the size and the quantity of wallpapers to create/search), and while it's a lot more tiring this way I'm also a lot happier on the content I end up writing now compared to the past!
One thing that always interested me during my career as anime blogger (and a question for you today) is understanding how different is my routine from the one of others bloggers and just how much time they take to write an average post on their blog.
At this point, after almost one year of blogging (going to celebrate one year the 22 of january), I start from time to time to feel guiltiness whenever I feel a post I just published might not be on par with the quality of other posts I've wrote in the past.
Same feelings that I get whenever a wallpaper I'm posting just isn't good enough to be showcased inside an episodic, but I don't have anything else at the moment to use due to the utter lack of good fanart in the very first moments since a series start airing.
Searching on the net and asking my fellow bloggers confirmed my suspicion that I was not the only one feeling this way with other people adding that "they felt guilty whenever the forget to do a post on their blog and leave it alone for more than a week" ending up creating random post just to revive their blog for a bit.
Its the incredibly popular (saw it really often recently) so called "We'll be back with more power and more focus on *insertrandomdatehere*" post, all promises that create some sort of a "death flag" for that anime blog marking his real and final death.
What do you think about it? How much has your routine changed since you started blogging? Is it time intensive like mine or not?
Do you feel "guilty" when the content you're writing is just not on-par with the rest of the content on your blog or you're just not posting enough?
What suggestions would you give to a blogger to improve his routine?
See you soon,
feal87