Episode 32: 2020 “Resolutions”: Write a Book?!?

I’m not a big resolutions guy. I believe in making up your mind to do something at any time and then following through and doing it. It doesn’t matter what the date is.

On the other hand, this is the time of year I love when I get to listen to other podcasters or read blogs or watch a YouTube video and see how people did over the course of the past year with the goals they set for themselves

I’m a study in contrasts, yes.

That’s why I’m making some “resolutions” in this podcast.

Listen in on the new podcast schedule and why, my big hair audacious goal, the review count plan for 2020 and so much more. This is the future of this website and all tis surrounding projects.

I’ve got a lot of work to do now…

Transcript of the Episode

If you want all the details of what I talked about, here’s an edited transcript of the relevant portion of the episode:

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, I think you should resolve to do what you want to do, no matter what the date on the calendar says. I’m one of those nattering nabobs of negativism when it comes to that; I believe there’s a duality in man if you will.

I like looking back on resolutions this time of year at the end of December/beginning of January. With all these podcasts and blog posts going up where people talk about how they did on the things they planned on doing at the beginning of the year, the resolutions they made the previous January 1.

How did they all turn out? How did their business go? How did their comic series go? All those kinds of things.

I hope to create a little bit of that for myself here. That’s why I’m recording this podcast, which I’m calling 2020 “Resolutions”, even though some of the stuff I’m going to resolve to do is stuff I’ve been working on already for a few weeks. I’m just going to say it out loud for the first time today.

So, yes, I hate resolutions. And now I’m going to make them.

I am after all, only human.

The first thing I’m going to do — because I have a lot of things I want to do with pipeline comics in the year 2020. I need to clear some room for more of what I want to do and I’m not going to bury the lede on this at the end. I’m going to bring it right up here at the front of the podcast.

This podcast is going to go weekly starting today. Basically I’ve been doing this podcast twice a week since this started back at the beginning of October.

I’m going to continue to do it. I’m just going to continue to do it once a week. This will give me a better chance to get ahead of schedule a little bit more, and clear more time for me to do more writing and more researching, and maybe some of the other stuff I’m going to mention coming up ahead.

I am not podfading away. I am going to continue the same format, it’s still going to be same “relatively” short format. When I created this podcast, I had in mind five to eight minutes — maybe 10 at the outside — per show. I think most of these podcasts have been closer to 10 to 15 minutes.

I try to make this as simple as I can for myself, and yet I still overdo it.

My initial plan for the podcast, by the way, is kind of laughable now. I really wanted this podcast to be five days a week. Nobody is doing that in comics right now.

Sadly, I just don’t have the time. I have a day job. I have a family. I like to sleep, but I’m still doing the podcast. It’ll just be every Tuesday.

I reserve the right, of course — if something timely comes up — to record a special edition of the podcast and release it on any day of the week that I want.

I said I was going to do that when this podcast began. And that never quite happened in the first three months because usually, it’s stuff that could wait an extra day and I’ll just have that on Friday’s show or the next Tuesday show. Not a big deal.

But once a week I think is good enough and, you know, if I change my mind later in the year, if I find more time coming up, I will use it and record more podcasts. But most of all, I just want to use this extra time to get ahead of schedule, because this will give me more time to write.

I’m not going back to the hundred reviews schedule I did in 2017 and 2018. In 2019. I think my final total is about 54 reviews. I have one written right now that I’m going to post on January 1.

I plan on writing 50 more reviews in 2020. I’m not planning on doing a long-term/thorough review or analysis of any particular series. I know people have suggested “Lucky Luke” to me in the past. If I did that, I would just do the Morris/Goscinny editions of Lucky Luke.

The new complete editions that Cinebook is publishing where they put two or three books into one are looking really good right now. I’m just now reading the first book because they have an excellent, excellent article at the front of the book that gives you the history behind the creation of Lucky Luke and a little bit of a biography of Morris. He’s a fascinating fellow, with a lot of interesting stuff going on back in the early days of Lucky Luke. That is worth talking about.

If I finished reading that book anytime soon, I’ll probably review that one in January or February. We’ll see. There’s a lot of reading get to go.

So no series overview planned. I’ll have more releases of series that I’ve been reading and reviewing as we go along, of course, and I will continue to find new stuff, whatever Europe Comics, in particular, puts out every month. I’m looking at that list; we’ll see which books are good to review.

I would like to include more videos. I say that every year and it hasn’t happened yet. I have an idea for a YouTube strategy that would actually build it up. Again, though, I just don’t think there’s enough time to do that. It would require more time and effort than I have right now.

And the website is always mission number one. This podcast feeds into the website. It mirrors the website. It’s a compliment to the website, but it’s not going to replace it and neither would a video channel.

A video channel would take up an awful lot of time that I don’t have. I need that time to read and write more.

One thing you’ll definitely be seeing in the early months of this year and something I want to take a big look at and do more research on and more quote-unquote reporting about is the history of the anthology comics magazines in France.

I’ve picked up a bunch of them on eBay recently — Pilote Journal, Spirou, TinTin…

Those are the big three magazines that originally published the likes of Asterix and Tintin and Spirou and Lucky Luke, and all the rest.

I’ve been looking through these magazines and it’s really cool to look at them. I picked up a whole bunch from the 60s thanks to eBay recently.

And I want to write about those. I want to talk about those. I think those will definitely require some videos to show you what I’m talking about, because I think in some cases, pictures won’t just tell the whole story. So this is all part of an overall plan to talk more about the history of French comics, where they came from, how they were anthologized, how they were later collected, etc.

There is a certain parallel to the American comics market with that, which I think is also interesting. And there’s a whole lot of fascinating characters. A lot of these creators are really interesting people.

There are actually comic books that have been written about them and their adventures that I want to read, even though they’ve never been translated into English. And I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. So I’m going to have to do it the hard way, and read these things in French by going through Google translator an awful lot.

So if there’s one resolution I have for 2020, it’s to write a lot about these magazines. That’s going to require a lot of reading and a lot of researching so I know what I’m talking about.

I’ve already started that process. It’s fascinating, and I can’t wait to share it all with you.

The biggest, hairy audacious goal that I have… the final one for the year… and I think it’s one that’s doable. And the very simple way that I plan on doing it….

I want to write a book. 2020 is the year I publish a book one way or another, whether it’s a PDF you download from Gumroad. Whether it’s something you go to Amazon and the Kindle Store, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to be a print edition.

I have a couple ideas. And I don’t want to talk about them just yet, but I’ll be repurposing some content from the website, rewriting some stuff, adding some stuff. It’ll be a short book. 30 to 50 pages of a booklet, if you will.

Again, I have ideas. I don’t want to announce them just yet. But when we get closer to the time, I will keep you all up to date on the process of that because I think it’ll be interesting to see how that all comes together because I will have to learn a lot in order to get that done.

Formatting alone, from what I understand, especially when it comes to Amazon could be something of a nightmare.

But I’m interested in doing it all.

And that’s about all I had to resolve for this year. I hope if anything gets added or subtracted to it, I will let you know. I still have a podcast to do every week after all.