Greetings, Loyal Reader,
Here at the Coffin, we seem to be experiencing writer’s
block once again, and so new articles have been slow to materialize. Man, even
writing that sentence was fairly hard. There’s been a lot of picture taking over
the last few weekends, so there is absolutely no shortage of new figures to
talk about; and, once again, the Coffin is looking to expand its coverage, this
time to incorporate Marvel or comic book-in-general figures, and some musings
on video games and a few movies, the latter two as part of this very Grave Considerations
series of pieces. There is ALSO a new Mass Burial that has been planned and
begun, but I’m waiting with it until the weather starts to change for the Fall,
as it seems like it would be appropriate.
I’ve long been intending to start covering comic book
figures, dating back to the very beginning of this blog, having many years back
begun a write up of a figure that still sits in a folder on my desktop, just
never having been finished. I feel like there’s some kind of pressure that
would come with writing on such figures, but that’s really stupid. My concern I
suppose is that my comic book figure purchasing is generally focused on either
characters I like or figures that I think look cool, even if I’m not familiar with
the character all that much. I think I’m worried that my knowledge of some
characters won’t be up to par, and I’ll end up getting too many bits of
information wrong; or maybe that I’ll wind up looking silly or something.
I kinda also think I’m not entirely sure how I want to go
about writing on them: something that has become more and more challenging with
Star Wars Black Series toys is
talking about the actual toy, and not about the character or what this particular
figure could mean for the future of the line. But talking about the actual
figures has gotten a little tough, since the figure itself is more or less the
same as the article before it, and the one that is yet to come. Last week I
posted four Black Series articles at
once, because I essentially wrote them up over the course of like 30 hours, and
all I was really doing was talking about the characters or individual figure
elements. That’s not intended to read like a knock on the line, because let me
tell you all, I still really love the Black
Series. But I seem to have exhausted my ability to talk about the points of
articulation on these figures, since they all have the same ones. The first Black Series article I posted came in
October of 2015, and if you read that one about the First Order TIE Pilot, you’d
have my general thoughts on the Black
Series buck and all of its potential. Sure, some bodies have been different
and offered small new details, but really, it feels so repetitive to just keep
listing knees and elbows and ankle rockers.
I feel that writing on Marvel Legends figures is going to
end up being the same, and then I’m going to have to fill the space of an
article: what do I focus on? Should we talk about the character, or some
notable storyline they populated? I’m not sure. I keep thinking that the best
way to figure it out is to just start writing on one and see where it goes, and
that may be the route I go.
Spent a lot of time this summer playing video games, and
there are things I want to say about them. But I’ve also spent a lot of time
listening to some podcasts about video games, and I think I’m hesitant to start
writing on games because I’m not really sure how to go about doing that, and
since I’ve been listening to people doing that, I am concerned that I won’t do
a very good job of this. I guess I’m slightly intimidated by hearing people talk
about video games well, and I’m not sure I can write on them to a degree that’s
going to make me feel satisfied in comparison.
I think the issue may be simply a case of writer’s block,
coupled with the mental fatigue of a new semester (the fourth week just ended
yesterday). But I’ve been fighting this all summer as well, this inability to
produce anything of quality for the blog. It just seems like doing anything has
taken a colossal effort, and then always feels kind of half-assed in the end. In
either late July or early August, I planned to make a massive photo-taking
effort, only to find out that the battery for our camera had died, and so that
was postponed while we waited for a new one to arrive. Then, I’d sit around and
think “let’s take a lot of pictures,” only to be chased away by the amount of
effort that would require. Over the last few weekends, I’ve spent an hour here
and there taking pictures of things, and so have accrued this huge number of
pictures of toys that are ready to be written on and posted, only to find that I
have little ability to write on them. Taking a break from blogging may be the
thing to set me straight, but A) I don’t really want to do that, seeing as I use
the Coffin as a pressure valve, so sometimes making myself write something does
me good, and B) my general response to feeling overwhelmed or overworked is to
put more things on my to-do list, for some reason, so always having things to
write on makes me feel better when I’m drowning under work and stress by giving
me more work and things to stress over. Wild, I know.
So, when I get overworked, I find myself more work to add to
my list, because that’s healthy, and from time to time it leaves me in this
state of paralysis. This time, it’s holding me back from doing some new things
that I think are pretty cool with my own blog, and I’m not finding that to be a
real positive situation. The worst part about this is that something that I really
love doing is feeling like a chore, as happens occasionally, but is never a
positive feeling. I know that this will pass, and then I’ll find myself in the
manic phase of blogging, where I’ll crank out several pieces with little
effort, and all of this summer/fall blockage will be totally forgotten. It’s
just a source of frustration now, with the semesters’ first essays coming in
and the usual stresses of college students not understanding freshman-level
English classes at the start of the fifth week of the semester, and the ability
to just write and decompress is missed.
I guess that’s it. Just wanted to stop by and say that we’ve
hit a slow patch, but it will subside in time. I have tons of stuff to talk
about, and am really excited to do so; it just hasn’t been working as quickly
as I’d like it to. I’m going to try and get something posted by the end of this
week, as the aforementioned stack of papers has got me pretty wound up, and I’ll
need a break. Thanks for listening, and good stuff coming in the (hopefully)
not too distant future.
No comments:
Post a Comment