December Wolves: Whys and Wherefores

Title is stolen from the final trade paperback of Y: The Last Man. The ending caught me by surprise, but it was sweet nonetheless. I'm going over everything I did and didn't do with the December Wolves project. Consider it the pre-post-mortem.

The fact that I'm even doing this shows just how disorganized and uncommitted to the project I am when it was easy to be organized and committed to the project. I have 14 updates in the hole by 10:16 and I'm pumping out the final one less than 100 minutes before time is up. It's disappointing. But. We're here, so let's go over what went well and what went so horrifyingly wrong.

The comic book reviews/deconstructions/thoughts went well, I think. I'm no stranger to criticism, so that was a little bit in my comfort zone, but having to push myself to be critical of something completely different is a good exercise, intellectually. I had to think differently about how I looked at a piece of consumable media. Also, the YouTube experiment was fun.

With that, I also had to think differently about how my language needed work but also how to keep the viewer's attention. Without putting too much effort into video-blogging, putting together the YouTube clips sucked away a whole bunch of my time. My skills are very rudimentary, but thanks to intuitive and user-friendly software, I dived in and put something together. Ideally, I'd like them to be shorter, since six minutes plus is a long time to stare at anything without it being broken up somehow, but again that's a matter of time.

Time, not surprisingly, is something I didn't use well. Whether it was starting at eight or nine on the second day with a germ of an idea or completely missing a foundational aspect of the hate for Twilight's vampire resurgences, in a lot of cases, I didn't marshal my time effectively. I spent hours staring at the screen whether it was watching YouTube or other videos, but by the end of the night, felt like I was a good two thirds done, but too tired to continue, so I put up the update, promising I'll swing harder next time.

Usually, I didn't. Going back to that Twilight post, I felt like I should have been a lot more specific in my judgment about it and wasn't. And yes, I know with the internet I can go and change it and no one's gonna know, but it's cheating. I wrote what I wrote and published what I published. Maybe I'll add some clearly labeled edit markers. But that's in the future. The Phonogram video feels like I was just going DUDE A COMIC ABOUT MUSIC THAT'S TOTALLY AWESOMESAUCE. But then again, it's been 6, 7 days since I published it, so I hope history is kinder to it than I am now.

There was also some difficulty with the software, specifically in how it warped photos. One day it worked on a sliding scale so that I could perfectly scale it down to the pixel, how big I wanted the image to be. One day, (you can guess which one by the size and placement of the images) it just plopped the image down in the window with no ability to control size whatsoever. That can also be changed in the future.

I'm taking away from this project that I need to invest more time at the front end and stop, cold turkey, putting things off until I have a night clear. Maybe if it's as simple as 15 minutes, every 2 hours, write something in the box and see what happens, the posts will improve. But, I need to learn and master that discipline.

I don't think December Wolves failed, as a concept. As a project, I know it didn't, because there's 15 updates on the 31st. But only under a limited view did it succeed. I did put up 15 original posts in 31 days. And it was grueling, but only in spots and it could have been easier on me. My choices led me to do the December Wolves project. But I also made the choices of dicking around on YouTube or Giant Bomb when I could have been synthesizing my ideas better, writing, or editing what I already written.

We'll see what launches in 2010. I'm thinking one post every three days, but that's only a thought, I can't be held to it and the usual. Perhaps 2010 will be the year of discipline. But now, I'm going to ring in 2010 by going to sleep. May your intoxication be long and your hangovers brief. I'm out.