Blog Anxiety

I've been having a real problem updating the blog the past few months. This is because I've been busier this year, in terms of travel and projects, than any other year in recent memory. Since March I've been to Spain, Singapore, Montreal, Holland, Texas, and have been bouncing back between Boston and New York it seems like every other week. In this time I've begun several blog posts, but haven't been able to finish them properly.

At this point my backlog is fairly massive, including some stuff from last year. I've got articles on Epic Mickey, Minerva's Den, Ocarina of Time 3D, Catherine, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dark Souls, and one on the overarching politics of Metal Gear that I've been tinkering with for months.

I feel like the "window" for many of these has passed. Ideally, you want to get out posts when the game in question is still topical. On the other hand that's weird of me to say, since I often write about older, obscure games that have nothing to do with what's "hot" in gamer circles (and pride myself on the fact). Clearly it wouldn't be out of character for me to publish them anyway.

I'd like to release all these articles by the end of the year, in addition to the final Looking Glass podcasts, the next few of which are finally finished and coming (Mark "Mahk" LeBlanc is next). I plan to release an article a week, even if I have to force myself to post some of the above articles in a less-than-ideal form. 

This is a blog after all, I often need to remind myself. My style (I've come to realize) tends toward the shape, length, and voice of traditional print media essayists. I read a lot of early 20th century political writing like George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, and for film criticism my touchstones are people like Pauline Kael Jonathan Rosenbaum.

What these people do isn't so different from what bloggers do, but print media, being less ephemeral than digital media, does have the added advantage (or disadvantage, depending on your perspective) of being "final" in a sense a blog never is. You want to polish things off, be absolutely sure you put your best foot forward, and be as certain as possible that what you publish might have some value for posterity.

It is this mentality I have trouble letting go of online, and I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. I once saw Arianna Huffington interviewed on The Daily Show, calling herself a blog "evangelist", and claiming you don't have to filter yourself online. You just post your thoughts, as messy as they are, and keep going, free from having to edit or polish. Blogging is just raw, uncut thought.

John Stewart seemed to think this was a bunch of crap, arguing that we have editors for a reason, and doesn't it makes sense to at least try to make something good - to revise it, to scrutinize it, to streamline it, to improve it - at least a little bit before you publish it? Huffington was having none of this, of course, but Stewart didn't seem convinced. Neither am I.

While it's obviously possible to tinker too much, I do think a degree of old fashioned print media self-scrutiny is useful. I dunno about you, but I tune out quickly when a blogger just seems to be writing their stream of consciousness thoughts on a topic. I expect a writer to parse their own mind, to exercise some discretion and select the best bits for my consumption. I want a statue. Not a slab of rock.