Thursday, August 14, 2008

A revenant, according to folklore, is a body resurrected to achieve some dark purpose, and although this imagery might not lend itself to pleasant simile, it does speak to how I resolve burnout. Sometimes I’ll plug away at something, only to suddenly flatline, and reality will not afford the luxury of a breather. I mean, certainly it’d be nice, you know? To be able to clear your head and rationalize and start anew. But for the moments when you can’t craft, like, a mission statement or something, one option is just to go. Blip the flatline, find virtue in motion.

It’s been a month since we started the site. Honestly the very thought of reviewing another movie–in exactly 50 words, natch–makes me want to vomit and alternately bang my head on the kitchen counter. The immediate goal is to secure a consistent traffic stream, a baseline of eyeballs, and you’d assume a steady influx of fresh content yoked to the SEO benefits of WordPress would foster this. The Internet, however, is an entity seemingly immune to the strictures of statistics and trending, and marketing to this requires what I’d call adnosticism.

The information superhighway seems altogether unknowable. Our visitor count spikes when it shouldn’t, plunges when it should rise, and is a phenomenon powered by randomness. I’ve heard Internet traffic likened to a trading floor, but even that generously confers intelligible patterns upon it. It’s more like there’s a trading floor, and tons of people are milling around, and then suddenly fireworks go off, but that’s okay because the clown arrived, and now he’s dead, plus a yawning pit opened up, after which the two priests threw up all over themselves, and now the clown is back, praise be, but all the chickens disappeared and somebody pooped in the corner over there. Or something.

What can you do, though, except pull the levers available to you? The first few months make up that critical period when most blogs fizzle, so we’re on the block, and all we can really do is keep publishing. There’s no time for a pep talk about passions, or why I enjoy movies, or how I can rekindle the interest. I’ve got to be the revenant and just will this keyboard to start clacking away.