Return of the Media Log

A preamble that includes: why I'm still on Substack, furthering my craft, and arbitrary containers

Six months ago, I was committed to writing more and publishing that writing here. I had recently completed Dispatches from the Riverdale Register, my weekly recap series on the final season of Riverdale. I loved the momentum that project gave me, the habit of writing something substantial and fun every week. I challenged myself to write a piece I could be proud of in 24 hours or less, and I succeeded. I had essays in the pipeline that would take longer to shape into the work I wanted them to be, but this was an encouraging start.

There were some speed bumps. My day job became incredibly fraught for reasons I don’t wish to get into. And then there was the Substack Nazi problem.

I didn’t want to start writing on here again without addressing it, and I wouldn’t address it until I had the time to research the alternatives. As someone with an audience size that’s only in the double digits, I had no incentive to turn this free newsletter into a paid one. Unfortunately, the platforms that are decent alternatives to Substack either cost money upfront, or cost money if you want the same ease of use that Substack provides.

My stance is this: I am going to continue publishing on Substack because I will never monetize Bildungsroman Blitz on Substack. My goal here is not to grow an audience of subscribers. My goal is to write, and to have people read what I write. And Substack is still the best place for me to do that.

Let’s rewind even further. In July 2023, I attended a writing conference. If I had one goal, it was to describe what I do to other writers, and either find people who write in a similar niche — cultural criticism with a touch of humor — or find people who like to read that niche. I left the conference having achieved that goal, but perhaps the greatest thing I left the conference with was a renewed recognition of craft.

In talking to folks who worked in the memoir and nonfiction spaces, and to others who blended genres, I collected new prompts and exercises to unlock my writing, and I began to radically reconsider how I, the cultural critic, appeared as a character in my work, or how I might imbue a piece with my perspective.

Around the same time, I had been thinking about resurrecting the old format of this newsletter - the monthly media log. After the writing conference, I hit on this idea of doing the media log, but in a quote-unquote more “artistic” way, using writing prompts to really delve into characters, or into my own biography. I already knew the three things I wanted to cover, and I had a chance to start writing about two of them while at the conference.

Finishing Dispatches from the Riverdale Register took precedence, of course. Okay, it’ll be a Fall Media Log rather than a Summer Media Log. Cue the aforementioned day job stuff. Okay, we’ll start 2024 with the Media Log. Hilariously, my Word draft file is still called “January 2024 Media Log”.

I was fundamentally in denial about how this was going. The first topic for the media log, Nicole Dorsey’s 2019 film Black Conflux, had fit the assignment perfectly. I had written a little over 1500 words, some of it from the POV of one of the main characters, some of it analyzing tropes, and some of it interrogating my empathy for troubled men in fiction and in real life. The second topic was Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City. What started off as a quick hit about what your favorite Wes Anderson film says about you ballooned into something so personal and tender, something that needed to stand on its own.

And yet even after finishing my Asteroid City essay, I insisted that I should tackle the third topic before anything got published. As I struggled to a) find the time, and b) find the hook, I finally realized how arbitrary it was that I was holding onto the Three Things a Month format when EIGHT MONTHS had passed since I first had the idea. Did it really need to be the three things from July 2023 when it was now March 2024?

So the return of the media log will be less a return of the media log and more just a return of my writing. I’m going to publish the Asteroid City and Black Conflux pieces as their own newsletters. I’ll probably still noodle on the third thing (unnamed in case I never finish it). I’ve got other, longer pieces in the pipeline. I’ve got so much more to say about Riverdale. And when I’m feeling excited or inspired, maybe just maybe the media log will return.

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Because this reminded me of my hiatus post, I am going to end it with some miscellaneous recommendations/observations:

• For the Riverdale-heads out there: does a May December and Lisa Frankenstein double feature make sense? Not really, but just putting it out there, film programmers!

• I wrote about Pokemon so much in the first year of this newsletter, so of course I have to mention that I watched the conclusion of Ash’s 26-year journey.¹

• Somehow I’ve never talked about Digimon: Ghost Game on here. Do you like Scooby-Doo, body horror, or adorable dinosaurs with evil alter-egos? Then you should watch Digimon: Ghost Game.

• Speaking of Scooby-Doo, I watched a streamed production of The Interrobangers, a play by M. Sloth Levine. I want an ever-expanding canon of theatre inspired by Scooby-Doo.² I’ve been waiting to see more of Levine’s work ever since they co-created one of my favorite theatre-cum-internet experiences of the pandemic, Tales from Camp Strangewood.

• Things I read and wished I’d dug more: Paper Girls and Ghost Story. Things I am reading and am digging: all the Sherlock Holmes short stories.

Me at the Salinger house from Party of Five. I wrote a little about that here.

1. Although as the narrator always says, the journey continues.

2. The Solve-It Squad Returns is another good example.