I’m writing this post about 10 days too early. But since I’m now on an every-other-week blog posting schedule, I thought this would be the most appropriate time to reflect back on the past year of blogging.
I started building this blog at the end of July 2018, with the first post being published on August 2nd, 2018. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with it, other than having it focus on mysteries — my favourite genre to read and watch.
At the time, I was deep in the middle of trying to stay sane while trying to finish the first draft of my PhD thesis. Writing that first draft was a struggle, and I credit this blog with helping me get over academic writer’s block. The way I saw it, I was training myself to write without thinking too much about whether or not what I was writing was perfect. Writing a blog post about the things I do for fun was a great warm-up for writing serious academic prose.
As of last week, I have now defended that thesis, and have the next month to finish final revisions of it. This is why my blog posting schedule is going to continue being a bit sparse for the next little while. But I expect to pick up the pace again in September.
Although much of July was devoted to preparing for my thesis defense (and combating some serious anxiety about it), my engagement with mysteries didn’t fully stop. I watched or re-watched several series: I watched most of the Hercule Poirot movies starring Peter Ustinov; after finishing Morse, I re-watched the pilot for Lewis; and I’m now just one episode away from having watched through all of Columbo. In fact, I hosted the most recent #ColumboTV livetweet event on Twitter. More importantly, I finally started reading books again (which I’ll write more about in a separate post a couple weeks from now).
As far as where I see this blog going over the next year…
The blog has already become somewhat unintentionally focused primarily on Murder, She Wrote. I have become more involved with the MSW fan community on social media, and so I’m excited to dive deeper into the show with my posts. I’m particularly inspired by what The Columbophile is doing with blogging and social media designed to inspire Columbo fans. At the same time, I do want to leave it somewhat open ended in terms of writing about other shows, books and games, as I would also like to spread my love of the mystery genre in general.
Murder, She Watched 
I look forward to seeing what you do with MSW, which is my favorite show. I’m also quite the mystery fan and love Morse, Lewis, Endeavor, Miss Marple, Poirot, among others.
LikeLike
Thanks! I love all the British detective shows too. That’s one of the reasons why, although I know Murder She Wrote best, I wanted to leave the focus of my blog a bit open ended.
LikeLiked by 1 person