I haven’t posted in a while, so I felt it appropriate to update all my readers and followers on what is happening around here. I do want to explore other thematic layouts for the blog. Since I started this blog in 2009 a lot has changed, book-wise, phone-wise, and otherwise. When this blog began it existed purely in cyberspace and consumed via the computer screen. Now we have smartphones, streaming services, Alexa, and other avenues of electronic consumption. The challenge is making this blog accessible, intuitive, and compatible with the multimedia-saturated world we now live in.

The posts have been very few and very far between because I have been in the middle of several creative projects. Some small-scale, some large-scale. In addition to these non-blog writings, it is summer in Wisconsin, bleeding into Fall, and the weather has been hospitable. Time to get outside and actually enjoy decent weather. Amicable temps, the Milwaukee food scene, and local festivals aren’t conducive to sitting down at a computer and typing.

On a related note, my Day Job poses challenges to churning out content for the blog. (Ugh, “content,” I hate using that word. But I’ll leave that for another time.) Without getting into specifics, my job involves me sitting down at a computer typing for long periods of time. My world schedule is a wee tad odd. I work four ten-hour days, leaving me rather un-enthused about sitting at a keyboard for long periods of time typing. So bear with me on this one.

FUTURE PLANS

Blog Format

The current image-centric blog format has served me well. Right now I am exploring other themes and formats. I want to make the blog smartphone-friendly, but also have it serve as a platform for long-form literary essays. This blog really isn’t the realm of the listicle and clickbait.

An idea is brewing to make this a more magazine-like online entity. Ideally, I want to plan reviews and essays in advance. That way I can have new posts every day of the week. This will involve pre-production and pre-planning. I will try to provide both original blog material and links to other websites where I write. The main website where I review is the New York Journal of Books.

Backlog Blues

I still have a hefty backlog of books to review. A majority of them are for the aforementioned New York Journal of Books. A couple are for the Early Reviewers program run by LibraryThing, a social media community for book-lovers. In addition, there’s a stray here and there for books I’ve read and I want to tell you about, but I didn’t read them for anybody. I just thought they were cool and you should know about them.

CCLaP Reviews

Why do all the CCLaP Friday posts go to dead links? Because CCLaP no longer exists. One of my long-term projects is to re-post my CCLaP Friday reviews. As a technical operation, it will involve me copying and pasting my CCLaP review I wrote on to the post. It’s not too tough, since it is already in html code and the post has all the appropriate tags pre-made. It only becomes daunting when there are over one hundred posts involved.

While I will be re-posting CCLaP reviews, I won’t be re-posting the themed essays. These went into the making of my two book published by CCLaP: On Being Human and The NSFW Files. They are available as inexpensive eBooks. Although I will send you one or both titles for free if you want to review them. Let me know by sending me an email to: driftlessareareview @ hotmail . com.

(You can also DM me on Twitter @driftlessarearv )

Play MST for Me/RiffRollin’

This idea had its genesis when I was a panelist at CONvergence. The panel was “The Future of Reviewing,” and we were discussing social media and review aggregators. The topic concerned movie reviews. I brought up the concept of “cultivating bad taste.” So often reviewers fall into two camps: reviewing the Greatest and lauding it with high praise; or reviewing crap with a malicious hatchet job.

As much as reviewing is about cultivating good taste, it requires an opposing viewpoint. Badness, like Goodness, is a multifaceted phenomenon. Plan 9 from Outer Space, Mac & Me, Patch Adams, and Battlefield Earth are all bad movies. But each are bad in their own particular way.

This brings up the concept of “riffing” on bad movies. Mystery Science Theater 3000 defined it and refined. It continues with RiffTrax. My perspective will make this feature about exploring examples of popular genres. We will look at the taxonomy of genre and badness, along with how the riffing complicates and accentuates these cinematic gems.

Tentative Weekday Rundown

NB: Some weekly features will be more irregular than others.

Mondays with the Supremes

Translation Tuesdays

The Wednesday Poetry Corner / The Wednesday Comics Panel

Non-fiction Thursdays

Photography Fridays / Fine Art Fridays

Feedback

Thoughts, ideas, etc., let me know in the comments section.