A year ago today, I began an unusual experiment on Crushing Krisis called “Blog of Tomorrow.”
November has always been a big month of blogging at CK, but in 2016 the idea was that I would spend an entire month posting as if blogging was my full time job in order to convince you, the reader, to contribute to CK’s Patreon campaign. Each day including a one-two daily punch of a Song of the Day and a “From The Beginning” read of Wildstorm. Plus, I debuted a new comic collecting guide each week and shared installments of my namesake novel, Krisis, for the first time.
It was every bit as insane as it sounds. I’m not sure I slept at all the entire month. The resulting 90+ posts were some of my best blogging of all time and I became a much better blogger in the process of writing them, which is not something I expected to be able to say in my 17th year of doing this! And, along the way, a small subset of CK’s readers kindly volunteered to pay for all of its hosting costs(!!!).
The only way I keep up that level of daily effort throughout 2017 was if readers were literally paying my salary – which would require an order of magnitude of more donations. That would be amazing, but it was never the point. The goal of my experiment wasn’t getting to writing the “Blog of Tomorrow” on a permanent basis, but to push myself to invent the quality and quantity of content that such a blog might entail.
Today, it is once again November 1st.
Part of me was tempted to go all-out yet again, trying to squeeze close to a 100 posts into a single month. It’s not like I lack for content. I have no end of ideas of series of posts to tackle, even if they would mean going another month sans sleep.
Yet, as much as I love big projects, I hate repeating myself. We’ve already proved that my blogging full-time could probably generate more content than most of you could read (or, at least, enjoy) on a daily basis.
This year, instead of thinking bigger, I want to think wider. Less posts and less hours, but more content and visibility. I’d love to get you back to visiting every week and knowing you have several posts of catching up to do each time.
What does that look like?
Daily posts! While I’m not going for the multiple-posts-a-day insanity, you will definitely have something to read each day at CK this month, and it won’t all be the same thing. I’ll be writing about comics, life in NZ, music, and maybe some other things too (plus, catching up on more of the Marvel’s Most Wanted Omnibus posts!)
New (and updated) comic guides! I’m not certain I’ll be churning out new guides on a weekly basis, but I’ll have a handful of brand new guides available for both Patrons and the general public this month after a hiatus during our move. Plus, many old guides will be getting a significant ugrade, including updating them with new collections and visual streamlining of their layouts.
But, the biggest news is…
New video show! Yes, you read that correctly. Today I’m launching a new series on my YouTube channel: Crushing Comics. The first season will be my process of falling in love with my collection all over again as I continue to unpack it, plus telling non-comics stories about life along the way. Hopefully this will break me out of my fear and reticence to post more multimedia content, and maybe even lead to some more new video series in 2018.
I’ll be posting daily episodes for the next week, and then regular (maybe even daily?) episodes for the rest of the month. Here’s today’s sneak preview episode, with a full-length version to follow tomorrow.