Wow, this week just blew right past. It was the last week of the footy season, which meant a push to finish strong. Work was, as ever, uncooperative. I spent most of the week at work or asleep and the one day off I had I spent at footy. Still, the plight of the nightshift worker is to either live when everyone is asleep and feel better but socially alone or to make the effort to scrap a social life out of the week and feel tired and grumpy. I’m not sure that I’ve figured out that mix very well. Typically, I push too hard over winter to have it all and then spend weeks of summer trying to recover some of the strength I’ve spent. Obviously, a better job would solve a lot of those problems, so I’ll keep applying for things but after two years to get this job, and now nearly two years trying to upgrade, I don’t have a lot of optimism about my prospects.
On the positive side, I made a schedule with story prompts, review ideas, and podcast topics to last out to the end of September. Now that I have a schedule spreadsheet (of course I needed a spreadsheet for this, you can never have too many spreadsheets) I don’t have to spend any time thinking up an idea on the fly, so I can just sit down and do it. Also, I cannot use not having an idea as an excuse.
I’ve also been thinking about how I want to structure my reviews. Typically, I want to look at a well known (read: too old to be in spoiler territory) story rather than the newest of stories. I’m reviewing stories for the purpose of analysing what worked and what didn’t, not whether it was great and worth watching. Not that I am going to refrain from telling you my personal opinion on a story, I just think that my subjective opinion doesn’t matter for the purposes of objective analysis and deconstruction. If a story element works or doesn’t work, it should be clearly definable one way or another. If I like or dislike a story has more to do with my own personal suspension of disbelief around the story elements that don’t work. I try to go into a story with as little expectation as possible, maybe a trailer or a blurb has reeled me in but I try not to take preconceived ideas into a film.
The reason I have been thinking about this is because I made the schedule spreadsheet so that I could time out a review for Star Wars Episode 9. In the previous 8 weeks I plan to go through the previous 8 stories and review them and finish with Episode 9 the week it comes out. I think I can’t really sink my teeth into story elements without spoilers, I tried with my The Boys review and I constantly felt my hands were tied behind my back while I was writing it.
Anyway, look forward to a flurry of activity of the next few days, as I catch up and get ahead of content so that I can prepare for the start of September and the big push for readers.