Back in September of 2022, I decided that I wanted to start a book and film blog. I missed blogging, for a start. People I encounter at my day job, and most of my friends, aren’t as into literature and movies the way I am. Not that they don’t read or watch things. Most of the people I come into contact with regularly are more pop-culture oriented. Comic books. Science fiction and fantasy. Special effects and explosions. Which is fine. Like what you like, it’s all good. But I wanted a space where I could discuss the Booker Prize winners, the Sight and Sound list, and similar things that make me borderline pretentious.
Okay, pretentious. I’ll own it.
The thing is, I didn’t want to launch this endeavor until 2024. I was going to be journaling, writing, and making some decisions about how to approach this project for a full year. There wasn’t going to be any impulsive ready-fire-aim in the execution of what’s now Books Movies Coffee. Then, of course, some things happened in the world of my day job, and I realized that the time to start exploring new revenue streams was now. Get something out into the world now. Begin to build an audience now. Then maybe, if things go well, I can be making a little bit of coin in this sphere by 2024, in the event that things go sideways in the day job as I predict.
Anyway…
After launching this, with a plan of doing a couple of posts per week, I suddenly needed to make another hard pivot. Without going into detail, a whole product line at my day job got thrown off-kilter because a large corporation decided that they needed to be extra-greedy this year. This meant creating a plan to immediately sunset that product line and come up with and launch a replacement, which meant doing that instead of this.
This is why, instead of talking about Langston Hughes and S.A. Cosby and Tolkien and Dickens and “Citizen Kane'“ and “Chinatown” and “West Side Story”, I’m boring you with what amounts to a personal rant-slash-filler post. It’s frustrating because I don’t want to be dealing with that, I want to be here.
Sigh…
So what I had planned to discuss originally was why I’m doing this as a blog, rather than a podcast or a YouTube channel or (shudder) a TikTok. To channel the late, great DeForest Kelley, “Damn it, Jim, I’m a writer, not a social media influencer!” You could also go with the fact that those spaces are already overcrowded, or that I’m too old and haggard for the audiences those mediums attract. Even though people don’t read blogs in the numbers that they once did, I don’t need the most eyeballs. I only need enough people to read this page to make it worthwhile.
Regular posting about books and movies resume next week. Unless, of course, something else blows up. Now, I’m going to go get some more coffee.