A while back, I conceived of my semitransparent internet writing process as such:
Twitter (brainstorming) –> pontif.us (drafting and annotating) –> Super Fanicom (relatively polished final products)
If a comment is too long for Twitter, or seems to warrant elaboration, I’ll go into more detail here; if I’m working on a post here that goes over 600-700 words, I’ll move it over to Super Fanicom…
Because this isn’t technically accurate, and I need something more apt to link to from the about page, allow me to amend.
Twitter comments and conversations often will work their way into things I write here and on Super Fanicom, but the relationship between the latter two is, it turns out, a bit different than I thought. Super Fanicom has become, for me, something of a niche-market slow blog; its posts, while most always opinionated after a fashion, involve more academic rigor than the majority of anime blog readers could ever possibly want — which is fine, as it’s both an outlet for that sort of thing and an attempt to broaden the foundations of sequential art study. It allows writers interested in intense analysis to take it to an extreme (lelangir once called it “anti-anti-intellectual”), and I like that, even if it has few readers. It’s more about writers anyway; I think of activity on SF.c in terms of comments rather than pageviews per unit of time.
This is, at least, how I use Super Fanicom; I can’t speak for the other writers. But it follows that many of my posts (mind you, I don’t deny the exceptions) are at least cursorily researched, often more thought-experiment than support of a claim, and thus they take a while to write. I don’t excise knee-jerk reactions entirely, but I only devote a bare minimum of time to them, usually. These posts are, in a word, work, and while I don’t dislike work (see here), I doubt it’s all there is to the appreciation and analysis of art.
Possibly I’m just saying this because I’m certain graduate school will eat away most of the time and patience I have for those lengthy, irregular tracts and confine me to spitting out my thoughts here with greater frequency (which I should probably be doing anyway). But I think there’s something to be said for editorial fast blogging, the writing of posts in one go soon after experiencing the subject in question. It has its relative merits and failings.
Take it away, Owen:
If you’re the author of a non-episodic fast blog…there’s a chance that you write short posts. You write them often. There’s the possibility that you don’t put a lot of thought into it. And your content will (not necessarily, but for some, with surprising regularity) be less meaningful and more homogeneous than that of a non-episodic slow blog.
That’s probably hard to avoid entirely when producing shorter posts more quickly. A longer post thought out equally well on the same topic will almost certainly handle the topic in greater depth; a post with more writing time behind it is likely to convey its point more efficiently. I’m willing to accept that (easy for me to say, maybe, since I have the other kind of blog too), assuming that there are a few ways of mitigating it somewhat.
“I like it” or “I don’t like it” certainly aren’t very useful to me in and of themselves (save as part of a sociocultural study, maybe, in which case they aren’t very useful except in large quantities), but a fast post needn’t be that alone. In part, it’s about playing to the strengths of the form; recording immediate thoughts and viscera can be useful for self-reflection, and it can even be deep in its cumulativeness, in a way, when you’re reacting to previous reactions from yourself and others (anitations is my exemplar of that). While each is relatively short, I hope my Fate/stay night posts build upon what came before; they should at least begin to in the near future. Personal preference also comes into play; I dislike “like/don’t like” posts and the episodic equivalent (i.e. most episodic blogs) because I don’t read that way. Shorter posts from me and the bloggers whose work I read are bound to include connection-making and plenty of little flares of thought because that is how we experience texts; story elements blossom into spirals of meaning not unlike fractal art, and it happens all along, not only after days or weeks of reflection.
In short, I suppose I could say that fast blogging would be great if everyone read like I did, but, you know, that makes about as much sense as it sounds. I’ll compromise by urging especially quick bloggers to think a little when both watching anime and writing about it. For my part, I’m pleased enough with some of my forays into the technique, even if things like this and this are so personal as to be difficult to read now (I still can’t believe I actually wrote the latter).
…Oh, right, the point. Super Fanicom and pontif.us aren’t “steps” so much as counterparts. In terms of specificity, comparative analysis, immediacy, and such, they serve different purposes. A more accurate model of my writing process would look like this:
SF.c and pontif.us don’t pull from one another directly, except when a post I’m writing here grows too long. And I’m not sure about the interaction between my blog activity and formal academic work insofar as I haven’t had much chance to test it, but I suspect I write better essays for having done that sort of thing in my free time, and I can think of a few SF.c posts whose premises I might like to work into essays, if given a chance.
Have you considered my recent work on WRL?
Over the past month or so I’ve worked on developing an episodic format that isn’t a summary + like/dislike affair (if I’m writing about a show, I most likely am endorsing it).
The method of the post is interpretation, introspection, exploration, speculation, and conjecture. Each episodic entry is an editorial on its narrow subject.
If you’re not interested in my
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0apologetics for Onosawa Mirai, I invite you to remember love for Macross Frontier, w/c publishes around the same time the first raws come out every week last year.I think this is a way to mashup episodic editorial fast blogging. We needn’t be limited by forms that came about and are maintained mostly by inertia.
If asked to describe your recent episodic stuff, I’d probably respond with “well, it isn’t really episodic,” which, of course, isn’t strictly true. I almost feel a need to move away from episodic/editorial and toward the more basic fast/slow, but then that may be misguided in itself; perhaps the way to go is not thinking in terms of dichotomies at all, which seems to be the route you’ve taken with your Mag8 and Macross F stuff.
Basic thinking: “How I want to write this post” vs “How I don’t”.
Too simple? …Yeah.
I have no idea how I write.
I think it would be lethal of me to ponder it, since I would then realize I don’t know since I never do write. I suppose, Superfani = weeaboo related things, Totality of Facts = whatever is not weeaboo.
Going by the results of your method, it does seem that you are doing your thing right. So, ur. Keep doing it.
Yeah, I suspect there is no one taxonomy into which every blogger falls. We have to (well, we don’t have to, but we can) invent our own personal taxonomies, which is fine with me. Like you said, as long as one isn’t overly concerned with pleasing an audience (and one shouldn’t be, I say), it’s really about how one wants to write; I don’t think that’s oversimplification.
Slow episodic blogging. Why not? I think a lot of the struggle (maybe it’s easy for ghostlightning) with episodic analysis blogging is having/finding a specific viewpoint one wishes to address. For myself, I hardly every “light bulb” a nice stimulation to write on, and when I do, I either don’t act or spend energy elsewhere. :/
God I’m such a terrible animeblogger lul. Most of my crap is totally unrelated, and a microblog is about the only place there is actual content about media. The thing is, my microblogging hardly has any analysis; it’s very thoughtless and spur of the moment, but the rawness helps in walking back through the experience…. perhaps generating ideas for a topic later.
But, I’m a coder not a writer, and I’ve constantly a big todo list.
Anyway, the more you can read things you’ve written out for “thinking aloud” or whatever, the better I’m sure. We can’t always say what we would like to without thinking first. Sometimes it works, a lot of times it doesn’t.
Cheers
Yeah, I really can’t do one post per episode/chapter/whatever. I need time for thoughts to accumulate between posts. Also, I really wouldn’t want to just repeat what I said before and pass a cursory verdict on the episode for lack of anything else to say.
Rawness is good. I use Twitter for that, and I’d consider posts here to be pretty raw, with the caveat that analysis is one of the first things I do anyway, so that’ll show up in a raw post. I wonder sometimes what my writing (and reading) would be like if I were a coder and not a writer. I very nearly majored in computer science instead of English.