Last month I wrote up a post detailing the films I'd seen in March. When I initially started blogging again last year I had hoped that mini-reviews and similar content would become a mainstay, something I could easily throw together when I was doing the 100x100 challenge, setting a precedent to continue once that was over. Simply put, I wanted to (and still hope to) keep a record of the books, graphic novels, films, music and TV shows that I have watched/read/consumed alongside a (hopefully brief) synopsis of my related thoughts. Too often I've had conversations where I knew I'd read or watched a particular piece of media, but couldn't really remember anything more than a vague outline of the story and a simplistic gut reaction: liked, hated, frustrated me etc.
Obviously, this record has not been a massive success. There are simply dozens of examples of all of the above that haven't ended up with even one line reviews in the interim (indeed, I couldn't find a single album/music review, despite swearing I'd written a piece on TwentyOne Pilots), so last month I trialled something a little different. Rather than write an individual review for each film I watched, I just added onto a rolling draft post and published at the end of the month (or slightly after, I might have forgotten for a bit...). As a result, I actually wrote reviews. They were quick, often initial impressions that I fleshed out when I came to actually hit publish, allowing me to jot down the key ideas ASAP; they also made me feel a lot better about not writing very much, just the core details I wanted to remember, as the post grew to a decent length through volume anyway.
As a result I'm going to trial a few more months where I expand the content being recorded. Far from just films, a monthly media mashup (title pending) will hopefully mean that there's always a handful of reviews and that no one area gets forgotten or ignored. It also means that, in months like this one, when I have an influx of one type of media (in this case, deciding to buy a bunch of graphic novels sat on my watch list for a few months) I can fire them all in as quickly as I consume them. So that's the plan; let's see how long it sticks for!
Update 13/06/2020: The Month in Media project worked well but has since been replaced with a dedicated Reviews section. Coincidentally, I had written that TwentyOne Pilots review after all.
