2011 Blogging Resolutions Revisited

Not going to lie, it feels weird to blog after Tokyopop’s shutdown. My first internship at the company was a huge influence when I first started this blog and it seems like a lot of people saw me as a Tokyopop editor.

Anyway, I thought it’d be best to blog about something positive. If you remember, at the beginning of 2011, I made a post listing a number of small goals I had for the blog and my career this year. I’m rather happy to say that I’ve completed most of them only about three and a half months in!

Here were my goals:

1. Get new glasses– I got my glasses this last weekend and they’re fantastic. I picked a pair rather like my previous pair, style-wise, but only because a flashier pair of glasses wouldn’t really suit me.

2. Get more freelance work, a full-time or part-time job (in comics, preferably)- Well…I did get more freelance work. Then Tokyopop shutdown and that sort of put me back to square one in terms of having enough money to sustain myself. I’m looking for more work, obviously.

3. Start Japanese or Korean language classes- Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to pursue this, but my mom was generous enough to offer to pay for more education. (She sees education as extremely important. I can’t blame her.)

4. Move the blog over to it’s own domain- Done and done! Truth be told, it’s made the blog much more successful than it ever was on WordPress.com

5. Join an affiliate program- Also done! Although no one has order anything via my program yet. I wanted to refrain from saying this, but with my current financial situation looking dire, it would help me out if you readers purchased something via the widgets on the right side of the blog there. The money will still go toward purchasing manga like I explained before. It’s just that no money = no manga for me and no manga = not a very interesting All About Manga. If you have anything you want to say about my use of the affiliate program, I’m more than happy to listen.

6. Write better posts- I don’t think I can judge this one by myself. Any thoughts, dear readers? (Please, I really want to know!)

7. Read more out-of-print manga- The majority of my manga purchases this year have been OOP manga or technically OOP manga (because of company shutdowns) and I couldn’t be happier.  While I love many series that are currently running, reading older series are a bit like studying manga’s history in the US. You read it and realize why this title wasn’t a hit in the U.S. or why it was! Because I’ve read a lot of OOP manga recently, I have a lot of theories about fans’ tastes and how they’ve changed. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to run a regular column on the OOP manga I’ve been reading.

So, I’ve reached approximately four out of seven goals. (I don’t think I can really take a good stock of goal number six until the end of the year or until I get feedback.) That’s really not so bad! I will keep on working on goals number two and three, of course, but here are a few more goals for me to strive for this year.

1. Blog more– I think I’ve been taking too many reasons not to blog and I haven’t felt the inspiration quite as much as I did before. That said, there have been a number of depressing events in my life this year so far. Still, I don’t want to quit blogging. For a little while, I wasn’t really blogging because I had a lot work going on, but now I’m not going to have that work in the immediate future. Something has to fill my time, right?

2. Design new business cards- Everyone thinks my current cards are really cute (my best friend designed them for me. Thanks, Courtney!), but they unfortunately have an error on them and I’d like to change make some changes. But other than that, I want to add a pronunciation guide to my name, since people seem to have a lot of trouble with the “Orihuela” part. (I know a lot of you want to treat it as a middle name and drop it, but it’s not that hard!)

3. Do more podcasting- It’s been awhile since I’ve been on a podcast, I’d like to do more! Of course, this poses problems since, if you don’t have your own podcast, you need to be invited onto one and I’ve no plans to start my own podcast.

4. Draw more- A few years ago, I got too busy and too frustrated to draw. I haven’t been able to recapture my passion for drawing since, but I plan to try and chronicle my upcoming trip to Vienna into a comic book travelogue. The project has at least sparked some interest in drawing for me, so that’s something.

Thanks for sticking with me through these past months and let me know what you think of the blog these past few months, including all the new changes I’ve made!