End of the Begining: The Reveaux Redux

Okay, time for some changes around here.

Horror movies are great and all, but all horror all the time is a bit of a drag. All anything all the time is a bit of drag, actually- not to mention boring to write about. Not that I was ever Mr. Prolific, but I’ve been doing this horror blogging thing for a couple of years now, and it’s pretty well played out for me. So basically that leaves this blog  at a crossroads. I figure I’ve got three choices here: shut down the Reveux and start a new blog; hang up the blogger thing altogether and do something more productive with my time; or retrofit this space entirely. I’ve decided to go with that last option- first, because at the end of the day I seem incapable of shutting my trap completely, and second, because I’m too lazy to start over from scratch. So starting pronto, I’m switching over to a free-form, shoot-from-the-hip format.

So…what does that mean, exactly? Well, first and foremost it doesn’t mean the horror movie stuff is necessarily going anywhere. I’d still rather watch a good horror film than just about anything else, and I’m rarely without an opinion on the state of the genre, so it’s pretty much status quo as far as that aspect of the blog goes. (actually, I'm hopeful writing about other things will make me more enthusiastic about my horror-related posts) I guess what it does mean is that if I wake up tomorrow and want to write about plastic cutlery, or why Kurt Cobain’s suicide was the best thing ever to happen to Nirvana, or why I hate going up into my attic, well, that’s what’s going up.  

I realize this approach is likely to kill some (most? all?) interest in this place. Most of the regulars here are devoted members of Blogger’s horror blogging community and (understandably) do not give a rat’s ass about my thoughts on microbrews, the Allman Brothers or the NFL lockout. I promise not to take it personally if you scratch the Reveaux from your feed, guys. You signed up for a horror blog, not a bunch of random unhinged nonsense. At the same time, I’m hopeful someone, somewhere, will enjoy listening to me run my mouth about other things- there are all sorts of disturbed people in the world, after all.

Which brings me to the somewhat touchy subject of Blogger “followers”. For the most part, I’ve always followed what seems to be the generally accepted etiquette of “You follow me, I follow you.”  This practice made sense, at least initially- a sort of co-op approach that offers participants some exposure within their particular Blogger niche (and anyone who says they aren’t looking for at least some exposure is full of it- why else are you posting your thoughts online for everyone to read?). However, this like-for-like approach leads to a couple of related things happening over time, neither of them good. One, you end up with a certain percentage of followers who actually could care less about your blog. You never hear from them after that initial visit; they’re just fishing for the reciprocal “follow” in order to run up their own follower count, the way some people collect absurd numbers of Facebook friends (I mean, come on… you have eight hundred “friends”? Really?). Two, you inevitably wind up cluttering your feed with a whole bunch of blogs that you never actually read (either because of a lack of time or because you never really liked them that much to begin with). So I’m putting an end to this cycle of lunacy and gradually cleaning out my follow list. Here’s the deal: if the blog is one I comment on or visit regularly (or semi-regularly), it stays. If I rarely or never visit, it goes, whether its author follows me or not. Again, it's nothing personal; just a little common sense housecleaning. 

So that’s where I’m at. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I’m looking forward to doing something different in this space.