The Music Banter Members' Journals Monthly Update Thread

[Trollheart]

On foot of what Urban said earlier, and my own comments notwithstanding, I'd ask everyone who has more than one journal to perhaps consider if they need more than one. Yes I know, pot calling kettle black, but all of my journals have had a specific theme that would not have worked in my original one. If you'll indulge me a moment, I'll take you through the thought processes that led to my creation of each new journal:

The Couch Potato: When I decided to start reviewing TV programmes and movies, I knew right away this could not be undertaken in my main journal. This one would not have really any music focus, and would be quite in-depth, requiring a lot of work to be put into it. The choice was obvious, and journal number two was born.

Bitesize: After getting some negative comments about the length of my album reviews, and with more to do than I could realistically ever manage, the idea of doing shorter, more to-the-point reviews came to me, and while initially I thought of incorporating this in my main journal, I again realised that to do this properly I would need a new journal.

Classic Albums I have never heard: This idea came from the constant references I would see from people about supposed "classic" albums, which I had never heard, or in some cases heard of. It was a different enough idea to merit its own journal.

Trollheart's Psychic Album Reviews: Yes, to be fair, this is one that could have lived as a section in the Playlist, but I wanted to draw attention to it and so made another journal. Also, it's updated quite infrequently, so it doesn't really get in the way.

A Nightmare on Jazz Street: Originally I had intended to look at jazz in the feature "Stranger in a strange land", but then realised the genre is so huge that I couldn't do it justice in so short a time, so began a journal to explore jazz. Sadly, after a few entries I realised my heart was not in it, and gave it up. That journal is now dead.

Trollheart's Futureshock: Whether he believes it or not, this idea was conceived long before The Batlord opened his own comic book journal. I had in the beginning thought that it might fit in with The Couch Potato, but quickly discounted the idea and decided I needed to make this a separate journal.

The Showroom: Originally conceived as an idea in my Playlist of Life journal, it occurred to me that I would not be able to afford people the proper time and respect for their music if I did not put this in a separate journal, which is what I ended up doing.

Sure, that results in my having seven journals (soon to be eight!) but you can see that each one of them had its own reason for being, and would not have worked as well had I just subsumed them into my main journal. Also, I tend to update so much that as Urban says, new ideas I want to highlight would be lost within the general flow of my main journal. The thing about journals is that, although there are no rules and you can write about whatever you want, they tend to fall broadly into two categories: ones that concentrate on a very specific, often niche, subject, such as "Music of the Caribbean", "The rise of Punk Rock" or "A thousand things you can do with cheese", and ones that are more general, like the Playlist or Urban's Journal of Stuff, where within that loose structure anything can and does go.

If you have an idea that is so outside of what your journal is concentrating on, by all means create a new journal for it, but if you can fit what you intend to do into what you are already doing, it's better to do that. Journals can be, and often are, so varied that in one you might find Frank Sinatra sharing space with Mayhem, or Wu-Tang Clan standing next to OMD, while someone goes on about their hatred for soap commercials. You can literally do anything in your journal, and you should: the more varied it is the more it stands out and the more likely people are to read it. Niche journals are fine, and both fulfill a need and allow for expression from the author on a subject he or she may want to hold forth about, but the reality is that the only people reading them are likely to be people interested in that subject, or people just bored and looking for something to read. If you have a journal where you never know what's coming next, people will read it, because there's always the chance there will be something there for them.

So if you're thinking of starting a second/third/fourth journal, or already have, consider these points before you do:

1. Do I need to open another journal?
2. Would this work, or could I make it work, as part of my current one?
3. Will I update this, and/or my other journal(s) as frequently, or am I going to get swamped?

If you open a new journal and concentrate on it, to the detriment of your original journal, that is not a good thing to do. I always try to make sure that while I obviously concentrate mostly on my two/three main journals, I return to the other ones periodically, to make sure they're not forgotten or slip too far off the pages. If you can't do that, you really need to ask yourself if you need a second, or third journal.

If it's seen as a problem, mods might think twice about authorising the journal of someone who has one or more already, perhaps of contacting the author to explain their idea and why they think they need a new journal before they give it the green light. Or not. I don't know. Urban has a problem with it: do other mods? I can certainly see his point, and would agree that, rather than five journals apiece which are sporadically updated and end up drifting down the pages, I would prefer to see one good journal that is well maintained. What do others think?