Four nights after my last post and I finally feel like writing again. I will say, overall, I found it easier to write the reviews this time compared to back in 2019 and I thought it would be good to do a wrap-up. Why did I do it, what was my goal, did I learn anything?

First, I wanted to challenge myself. With NaNoWriMo being NoMo, I still wanted a set of goals to force myself to write more and this seemed like a good idea. It didn’t require me to create stories whole cloth from my own brain, just give my half baked opinions on other peoples work, which is way, way easier. Also, I just like talking about things that interest me (compulsion is probably a better description) and hoped some of the articles would spark conversations. It also gave me an excuse to watch old movies, although, I didn’t really need one, as I do it all the time anyway.

Did I learn anything from this challenge? Yeah, a lot I think. First, my grammar is still atrocious, I use commas in places I’m probably not supposed to and I love using parentheses (which probably annoys some people).

I also found it was sometimes harder to get myself to watch a movie than it was to write about it after. Not because I knew a movies was going to be bad before I put it on, I’m not getting paid to do this, so I only ever chose to watch things I genuinely thought I might like. It was more the time it took up and the fact that sometimes I was more in the mood to do something else, like mining spice in the Deep Desert or trying to get caught up on One Piece (only 920 episodes to go!) I set up what I feel was a pretty good routine. Start watching a movie around 9pm, begin writing the article afterwards. Finish the article and edit it while eating breakfast before work the next morning. It went well most of the time, but some nights I got a late start or I just didn’t feel like watching a horror movie and my mood may have caused me to be overly harsh.

Would I do this again? Yes, absolutely. I enjoyed the process overall and don’t want to stop, I just won’t do it as frequently as every night. I’m tempted to do the same thing for Christmas , but maybe only every 2nd night, calling it the 12 days of Christmas Movies or something. I’m not sure how useful that would be though. I have a bunch of movies I already watch every Christmas season, and feel it would just be me gushing about why I love Scrooged, An American Christmas Carol and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation… but… as I’m writing this, I’m thinking it doesn’t have to be feel good Christmas movies I watch. Maybe I watch Christmas themed horror movies, like Black Christmas, Krampas, does Chopping Mall take place at Christmas? How about that Billy Bob Thornton movie, Bad Santa, not a horror, but not a traditional Christmas movie, right? I’ve got all of November to think about it.

Would I do 31 Nights of Horror again specifically? Yes, I think so. Maybe not thirty-one consecutive nights though. Maybe get a list of movies I want to watch and watch them throughout the year, but place the reviews in a folder to be released once a night next October. It would be less stressful, and I can devote more time to making the reviews better… but it isn’t as much of a challenge if I do that. Maybe a hybrid, write and watch most of them in “real-time” as it were, but have some I had watched earlier in the year as backups for the nights I need a break. The night before I wrote the article about Halloween board games, I was playing some of those games with friends up until about 11:30pm and still needed to watch a movie after they went home. That was a long night.

So, I’m going to try and keep writing these. Maybe only once a week, hopefully more often, but I make no promises. It may only be a recipe, those might be better as videos, though that’s something I haven’t tried before. We’ll see. I’m also going to talk to my doctor about increasing the dosage on my medication. I think it helped, but was inconsistent.

I also want to thank everyone who read this and the other articles, and those who would click “like” here and on the social media platforms I posted the links on. It means a lot to me knowing I’m not just talking to myself.