Big things are happening around here. The Missus and I have a little bundle of joy on the way, due in a couple months. I'm excited, but the preparations -- along with other things going on in the world -- have given me less time for reading than normal. (Or perhaps I should say "less time for reading and writing." I could read a few comics every night, but there would be no time to compose posts for every one of them.)
The result is that, in order to keep this blog on a regular schedule, I've decided to bump my "in-depth" single-issue posts down to one a week, beginning tomorrow. The only thing changing is that I'm removing Wednesdays from my regular schedule. So you'll see one John Byrne FANTASTIC FOUR a week, every Monday, then the usual rambling Friday review a few days later. Sundays will remain normal as well, with The Unboxing once a month, as well as the monthly(ish) looks at various X-Men collected editions.
So it's not that big a change, and in fact, this is the schedule I had originally envisioned when I started things up two-and-a-half years ago! The original statement was, back in August 2013, "comic reviews on Mondays to start, and then whatever strikes my fancy -- TV, movies, games, etc. -- on Fridays." Thus, just as John Byrne took the Fantastic Four back to their roots in 1981, so am I doing the same with NOT A HOAX! thirty-five years later.
Tomorrow: FF #263. Friday: Our excursion into the Hyborian Age concludes with RED SONJA/CONAN. Sunday: An announcement about the next few weeks of posts. You'll barely notice Wednesday is missing!
Congrats on the new arrival! It's one heck of an experience, and tons of fun. Enjoy it!
ReplyDeleteAnd I can tell you from experience that having a baby isn't the hobby killer some make it out to be. It just means you have to do some prioritizing (which we already do anyway), and it sounds like you've got that figured out.
Thanks! We're pretty much the last among our circle of friends to have a kid, so I've seen how a lot of them have dealt with it. Some seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth, while others just drop the kids off with grandparents at the drop of a hat and seem to have the exact same social lives they had pre-children. I suspect we'll be someplace in the middle, but that obviously remains to be seen.
DeleteScaling back is something I'd been thinking about for a while even before the baby was in the oven, though. Between work, TV, social activities, and simply reading things for pleasure rather than with the intention of discussing them here, I was starting to feel overwhelmed doing two "in-depth" reviews a week plus something on Friday (it's why I did TEEN TITANS in a less structured format last year; to relieve some pressure and give me time to catch up elsewhere).
I have great respect for the sheer number of reviews and other articles you produce every week, between GoL and PopOptiq. I don't know how you do it!!
My wife and I were also late to the party relative to our circle of friends that have kids, which definitely helped in the transition. We fall somewhere in the middle as well, though we're lucky that both sets of grandparents are in town, so we're usually able to get a babysitter pretty easily.
DeleteAs for my output, I'm lucky to have a day job that affords me little snippets of time here and there throughout the day, waiting for tasks and other stuff to run, when I can do a lot of the layout/picture uploading and editing work on the posts. Plus, I work four ten hour days during the week and have every Friday off, so I usually can get some more stuff done during nap time.
The biggest hit as been to responding to comments - in order to keep my post output going, I've become a lot less diligent about responding to every comment, or in as much detail as I'd like. It sucks, cuz I love reading and responding (it's like talking comics with your friends!), but I just don't have the time to do it as thoroughly, and keep writing so many posts, any more.
Yeah, I do some of my updating at work in my downtime as well, but we've been pretty busy lately and I just haven't had as much of it.
DeleteThanks again for the words of encouragement!