Taking Stock of the Blog

I've written this blog now for about two and a half years, so I thought it was a good time to take a look at the state of things. Why now? Well, if my blog was a business venture or a career path, I'd be thinking long and hard about the three year rule right now, which says that if you've made a go at doing something for three years, be it writing or photography or teaching, and you aren't making any progress or headway toward your goals, then it's probably a good idea to quit before you waste any more precious time. The thing is, this blog is not a business venture and entertainment writing is not my career. Miss Media Junkie is a hobby, something I do in order to keep my writing skills sharpened and to provide an outlet for the media-obsessed fangirl part of me that refuses to go away.

Also, I think that I have made some progress. In the beginning I wasn't sure what I really expected this blog to be. I liked writing movie reviews, but didn't have the funds to keep up with everything at the box office, and didn't want to be devoted entirely to older films. I liked writing about television, but didn't feel that I knew enough about that world to cover shows in much depth. I could have just kept an online film/television diary the way that I'd seen other people do, but then where would I put the meta analysis pieces that I occasionally found myself typing out on discussion forums, or simply on a whim? If I were writing to gain regular readers or to rack up page hits, the first thing anybody would tell me is to pick one thing and focus on it instead of bouncing around among all these different topics. Alas, my attention span simply would not stand for that, so I wound up writing about everything, and I'm pretty happy with the current mix. This month is leaning heavier toward TV content because of all the new series premieres, but it'll be holiday crunch time for the film world soon enough.

Keeping this blog going has really cemented for me how much I enjoy writing, even when I've completely run out of ideas and I'm typing up a piece I know is terrible. Stephen King famously responded to the question, "Why do you write horror?" with "Why do you assume I have a choice?" I can sympathize, because I feel like I've been writing as Miss Media Junkie since I was a kid. Long before the internet, I used to write my own episode guides for my favorite cartoons, I made endless, elaborate lists of favorite movies, and I was a voracious reader of anything entertainment related - and I don't mean the celebrity gossip pages. At one point in the early 90s I distinctly remember wanting to be LA Times critic Howard Rosenberg when I grew up. Before blogging I tried various other outlets and learned to write about many other things, but I always found myself getting sucked back into the entertainment world again. If I didn't have Miss Media Junkie, I'd probably be spending a lot more time in various TV and movie forums terrorizing the locals, well, more than I already am.

There's still a lot that I want to do with this blog. I haven't managed to gain much of a regular readership or become a part of the larger media blogging community, the way I was hoping for. I think that would require significantly changing my tactics and doing more self-promotion, which I'm not good at. It would require socializing and networking, which I'm also not good at. I've taken stabs at some social networking, making myself available on Twitter, Bloggers, and occasionally putting links to a few pieces up on Reddit, but I'm loathe to do too much. Part of me is very wary of attracting more attention because I don't think I'm equipped to handle very much of it. On the other hand, I readily admit that I check my stats every day and I'm always happy to see a bump in traffic, even when I know that bump is just the adbots doing their thing.

Whatever I decide in the future, there's no way I'm going to stop blogging in February when I hit my three year anniversary. I enjoy the writing and the researching and the whole experience of blogging too much. Even if nobody is reading my stuff, I don't consider myself a failure in the least. There's another of bit of sage advice that says that if you ever want to be truly good at something, you need to put in ten thousand hours (or ten years) of practice at it. That means I still have quite a ways to go.
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