Month: May 2018

New Film Review Site Is Live!

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

Thought is the parent of the deed.

— Thomas Carlyle

After mulling for a few days over the question of whether or not I should keep publishing film reviews on The Cat’s Cradle, I decided to go ahead and make a new, separate site for them.

I present to you:

(Heh, that didn’t take long for me to decide, now did it?)

I’ve been writing reviews about various topics and media that are obliquely related to noveling, but these have been spread over several sites from 2012 and on. I won’t be removing those reviews from their original sites, and I will probably continue to post some reviews (mostly for books) here. I want to keep my regular writing-related posts on The Cat’s Cradle, which will still be published every other Monday. Any other reviews will be posted on or copied to Second Unit Reviews. You can expect a post every Friday for the next few months as I collect, edit, and republish the collected content. All previously published reviews will have a link to the original post and the date it was originally written. This will include reviews of the Star Wars and Marvel movies which up until now could only be found on my private Facebook, but will now be shared with all of you! Once I’ve caught up on the old content, then posts may become more sporadic, since I can then write about whatever catches my fancy any time I choose. After all, the point of Second Unit Reviews is to have a fun, informal place to geek out. (I will do my best not to let this shiny new toy interfere with my regular writing responsibilities!)

So, if anyone is interested in my screen-rants and fangirling about movies, TV shows, comic books, anime, and video games, please be sure to check out, follow, like, share, and otherwise enjoy Second Unit Reviews!

Should the Cat’s Cradle have film reviews?

Click HERE for the Audio Edition!

 

Hello, readers! I have a question for you. Well, a couple of questions, really.

The main focus of The Cat’s Cradle is (supposed to be) writing, specifically in relation to fantasy novels, structured around personal experience and anecdote. However, I also like writing reviews of films and television shows along with a large dose of fangirling.  Some of these kinds of reviews have already popped up, but I try to keep them to a minimum. After all, this is supposed to be a writing site, not a movie review site.

But I do enjoy writing about things I really loved (or hated) about stories in other media, even if it doesn’t directly relate to writing. Over the last few years, I’ve done a few “reviews in sequence” where every day or week for a certain span of time, I write a brief review of a film that is part of a series or franchise. The two I’ve done so far are “7 Days of Star Wars” from 2016 where I watched Episodes I-VII (one each night for a week) and wrote reviews about each one. Then I did “The Merry Months of Marvel,” where I reviewed one Marvel movie each week starting in January 2018 and ending in May 2018. Currently these are only found on my private Facebook, as I didn’t want to flood The Cat’s Cradle with this off-topic random content, so they’ve only reached a very limited audience.

Ideally, I’d like to have a separate “blog” section on The Cat’s Cradle to post geeky gushing, but my WordPress site is, by necessity, very simple since I have neither the funds to afford purchasing a more complex theme/skin, nor the skills to modify what I have beyond some basic cosmetics. Right now I can only add static pages rather than individual entries, and apparently this Piano Black theme has been retired, so if I try to overhaul the site, I may not be able to switch back if I decide I don’t like the new look. I don’t really want to do that if there is little to no interest in my screen-rants.

Plus, there are a bunch of other questions I need to answer before making such a change:

  • These reviews are fun to write, but will they distract me too much from working on my regular entries and my novels?
  • There are already a lot of sites that do far better, more in-depth, and more entertaining reviews than I do, so do I have anything new to add?
  • If I can’t add a second scrolling blog to the current site, do I just post them in with regular entries (with a special tag, of course), or should I make a whole new site and link the two? (I already do have basic access to another site, Geek La Femme, but I technically did not create it. It is essentially abandoned, and I don’t know if I can or should resurrect it in any way.)
  • If I do make a new site or section, do I move the reviews that I already have done over to that new place (which can create a host of dead links) or leave them where they are (which may leave people confused and the organization system muddled)? And if I decide to make a new site, should I take my content from Geek La Femme (which includes reviews of anime and video games) and add it to the new one?
  • If I write or post any such reviews, should I add them to my Audio Editions, even though I get behind on the regular ones so often? (Recording them doesn’t take long, but editing can range from 2 to 4 hours, and I have little enough time as it is.)

So, what do you folks think? Should I bother with this or just let things rest as they are?