Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: Do you ever go "way back" to when you first started blogging and look at your old review posts? Do you see any differences from then to now?
I have just under a hundred reviews that I wrote before I started blogging that I have never posted. Sometimes I dive back into them and pull up a review to post - my intent is to eventually have all of that backlog posted. The trouble is that I'm not particularly happy about a lot of those reviews and often need to do a lot of revisions to them, mostly because when I started writing reviews I didn't go as in-depth in my analysis as I do now. In the specific case of reviews of collections or anthologies of short fiction, I usually didn't discuss the individual stories within the compilation the way I prefer to do now, so when I post those older reviews, I need to make really quite substantial revisions.
I would like to think that after having written somewhere between six and seven hundred reviews over the last several years of various things (mostly books, but some movies and television programs), that I have gotten better at it. At the very least, I review things differently than I used to, and when I go to post one of my older reviews, I generally feel the need to bring them into line with my current way of writing. This often requires rereading (or rewatching) the material being reviewed, which is why the process takes time.
That said, I don't often go back and revise the reviews that I have posted on the blog. I figure that once something is out in the public eye, going back to redo it is kind of cheating. I will make corrections if I notice a grammatical error or spelling mistake, or if there is some sort of factual error in the text, but I won't change the analysis and opinion portions. If one starts tinkering with old stuff, then one can quickly fall into the trap of never getting anything new done. That way lies madness, as the example of George Lucas with his constant tinkering with the original Star Wars trilogy teaches us. I don't want to be the George Lucas of reviewers, so I refuse to go down that path.
Previous Book Blogger Hop: According to Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, a Normal Human Skeleton Has 214 Bones
Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: According to Ken Burns, There Are 216 Stitches on a Baseball
Book Blogger Hop Home
No comments:
Post a Comment