Some may have noticed that I’ve been kind of neglecting my humor column as of late.
It’s not that I’ve stopped writing it altogether, even though that’s pretty much what a look at the archives might suggest. I guess you could say that I’ve just been … busy … and humor hasn’t been getting the priority it deserves for about the last year or so.
For what it’s worth, I have still been writing … I’ve got bits and pieces scribbled down for a lot of the columns that I’ve missed, but it’s just going to take some time to organize and pull them all together. It’s going to be a ton of work, but that’s not what I wanted to write about here…
This weekend I started working on the next redesign of comedic-genius.com, and so far I think I really like what I have. It’s kind of a tricky redesign because right now there’s a bunch of really old stuff on that site that doesn’t directly relate to The Humor Column. It’s mostly other random columns and writing that I’ve done over the years, and even though none of them ever found the same traction as humor did, there’s still a sizable volume for a couple of them.
So part of the problem is that I don’t know what to do with that stuff. Some of them I honestly couldn’t care less about, but others I look back on and really appreciate for where I was in my life when I wrote them … and yet I’m not sure if they really belong on a site that’s supposed to be dedicated to humor writing going forward.
And yet on the other hand, I’m kind of really enjoying creating a site that’s solely dedicated to just that one feature because after almost 15 years of writing this stuff, there’s actually a lot of different things that I can do with all of that old content now! Not only does the new design that I have so far do a bit more to highlight by older recent columns beyond just the latest one, but I’m also looking forward to going back into my archives a bit to bring back to light some of that older content as well. This is the year when I’m going to break 500 humor columns published, which from what I’ve been told is a pretty big number for a weekly feature, so I want to take better advantage of that and not just show off whatever I’ve written most lately.
Of course, I also need to build a proper store into this site because the # of books that I’ll have for sale by the end of the year should be really getting up there … I’m not nearly as excited about building that simply because I’ve looked into it before and have yet to find a store plugin for WordPress that I really like. And it doesn’t help that a lot of them aren’t free, making it tough to try anything out because I’m not exactly going to drop $80 on a plugin that I don’t end up liking!
I think it’s going to be an interesting year, even if it still takes a couple more months to really get my humor game back where I want it to be. I’m not happy that I’m not publishing a weekly column at the moment, but I think when I finally get back in gear, it’s going to be a much better presentation and hopefully that will help keep me a little better motivated to stay on track in the future.