The first post is here, although this was also inspired by this Side of Fiction post.

Sidenote: This tacking of numbers to the end of post titles seems to be a completely new thing, spurred on by my return to the blogging scene. I don’t know if my return will last as long as my old weekly schedule did, but *shrug* you never know in the blogosphere…

Since I confessed to not having an up-to-date post at the time of the first post, I might as well update it now.

How?

• Now that I’m no longer running on a proper weekly schedule, I use the skeleton of the old schedule to schedule my new content (as in, there are just Wednesday posts on whatever).
• As of this particular point in time, I was so inspired by others (and willing to procrastinate on other things) that I managed to knock out 4 posts in one day (two Manga March posts, one update to announce that was happening and this one), each being a good 500 – 600 words at least. Lemme come clean about this – it is currently 2:30 am on Boxing Day 2021 in my timezone and I am still running on the power of inspiration, even though I was awoken by the sun at 8 am on Christmas Day, haha. Admittedly, as you can tell when the first post was published, I’d switched from being a blogger to a creative writer around then. That’s why my renewed vigour is making this time an outlier (I think I said this in one of my other posts, but for some reason, I cannot be both a blogger and a creative writer at the same time – I make a conscious switch between the two).
• I used to have posts scheduled sometimes months (like the Manga March ones now) or several weeks in advance, but my reserves ran dry around the time of the first post.
• I gave up on using Word docs for posts for the most part and these days go straight into the editor. For stray ideas, I do jot them down on a private Word doc or a checklist in Google Keep though.
• How much do I do? I think it was Remy (…?) who once praised me for having short posts (<1000 words each) just because I find a good place to stop (to memory, this blogger who praised me said my posts were “easily digestible” or something to that effect), but as my confidence increases, so too does my verbosity…haha. My OWLS posts have exceeded 1000 words on occasion.
• How do I grab screenshots? Print Screen. It’s never done me wrong. For photo editing, I use Paint.net, which is a free Photoshop alternative. For images which are not personally-made content, I will always say what the source is in the caption (so people can chase stuff back).
• How do I edit? *points in surprise at myself* Me, edit??? Aside from the aforementioned “reading backlog” and catching errors as I spot them while I type, what you see is what you get in the finished product. I’m just that crazy to be correct in my spelling most of the time (unless I check up a word I doubt the spelling of, which is…not very often, to be honest), haha.
• Generally, I just run with my train of thought from start to finish. If I shift the parts of the post around afterwards, it can feel a bit weird because I can sometimes tell a shift has happened – for example, if I introduce something somewhere and then break the point of introducing it there by shifting them. Generally I just start with a title and a topic in mind, so I “hit the ground running”.
• I use the system WordPress has to tweet out content immediately after it goes live on the blog and basically nothing else unless someone asks, “Are you a blogger?” (That said, due to my break, I can’t really see myself as a “blogger” anymore…haha…ha…) I’ll stick the hashtag in the title as the first word if it’s AniTwitWatches, but otherwise I let the content advertise itself.

Why?

• Why anime and manga? I think I explained this in Karandi’s comment section, but I shall elaborate: anime and manga are friends I’ve known, longer than most, if not all of the people I’ve called my real-life friends, that will never judge me for what I am or who I am. They’ll always be there to take on my frustrations and even reflect them back to me if I’m capable of seeing that in them, but if I deny my problems, then they won’t show me that. Also, since I’m crazy enough to be doing my studies around translation after anime and manga got me there, then it just makes even more sense.
• Why do I write in dotpoints and small paragraphs a lot? It’s easily digestible. However, the more I write here after my time away has made me realise what I now call “a can of whoop-ass” (a piece of text 3 lines or more long, which has an element of surprise to it after being sent in real time on Discord) has made my sentences longer and more complex than they were pre-break and I also write more like I’m speaking, complete with laughter (generally sheepish, possibly even somewhat feigned), LOL.

What?

• I leave my topic “open” deliberately in case I go in an unintended direction. Generally, finding what to write about is the hardest part of being an editorial-style writer, to the point where failed posts can feel like you’re grasping at nothing of worth.
• I don’t get myself into a twist if someone’s covered a topic before, even if that “someone” is me (as you can tell by this post already, haha).

When?

• Once I decide to write a post, I generally let time slip away so I can finish the darn thing. This means normally I’ll let 2 solid hours go by and, while I will have been productive in the sense I’ve written out a blog post, I…will have let my other priorities waste away, haha (like sleep right now). Generally, I only write in little bits if 1) I’ve been stuck on an idea for some reason (I do have Word docs and drafts set aside like I used to, pre-break, in case they work out eventually) or 2) I realise something’s incorrect/broken and go in to fix it (which is more often than you would expect, because I occasionally read my own backlog). Editing up a fancy header image, e.g. for OWLS, or grabbing screenshots? It’ll take me another hour or two. Researching kanji to be sure my argument for something, which hinges on that meaning being correct, works? Do it in a new tab (one of the people in the Discord server recommended OneTab and that’s useful for compiling Japanese words I will eventually want to throw into Anki to memorise for future translations, or alternatively new vocab I might find a use for in a blog post one day). I’ll put in categories and tags before I schedule or hit publish, so I know what the heck the post is actually on about.