New Blog Focus? — Myriad Misadventures

Should I change the focus of Myriad Misadventures? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Now Myriad Misadventures has always been a little fluid, always sort of been about whatever I was doing at the time. That being said there were conscious decisions I made about where the blog was going at different times.

When I started the blog is was exclusively a travel blog. I named it Myriad Misadventures with the assumption I would write a little about whatever I was doing, from traveling to expat life to video games even. But initially it was pretty focus on travel. A little while later it branched out for the first time when I wrote a couple of posts about martial arts. That’s where it stayed for quite a while, with posts, and later photos on Instagram and videos on YouTube, being about either travel or martial arts.

Later on I started doing the fight videos and eventually started to write a little about movies and my attempts at making short films, which has more recently morphed into the 100 Movie Project. So now, in theory at least, there should be a bit of a trade of between the three; travel, martial arts, and movies. And while I’m still posting travel stuff on YouTube that’s mostly because I filmed a lot on my trips in 2019 and 2020 and I don’t post frequently enough so I’m still posting those vlogs on YouTube. But the blog has shown a glimpse of where the page may be heading since it doesn’t have nearly as many travel related blog posts.

The blog never had quite as much travel content as YouTube because what would be a multipart vlog series on YouTube took up far fewer posts on the blog. For example my trip to Tokyo, which was fairly short, had 11 videos on YouTube but only 2 blog posts. I probably could have written one or two more if I really tried but the fact stands that I can make a lot more videos about a trip than blog posts.

Couple that with China’s never ending COVID restrictions and my new job and the travel content isn’t looking so great. I’ve gone on a few short trips since COVID started in early 2020 but nothing like the trips I was going on in 2018 and 2019. I was also able to go on those trips because being a teacher afforded me two long, paid vacations every year during which I could do a lot of traveling. Now that I’m a social media manager I don’t have those long vacations to travel, so even when (if?) China ever loosens their COVID rules enough that travel becomes feasible again I probably won’t have the time to travel that I did before.

These two things together have me wondering if I should pivot the blog more towards martial arts and short films and away from travel, especially after I wrap up the three or four main trips I still have to post about (Indonesia, which I’m posting videos about now, Fujian, Japan again, and Guangxi). I don’t really think I’ll get rid of all the travel content but I do think that it will become a much less visible part of the blog. And what I do post will probably be more Shenzhen specific, a little more American expat in China and a little less world traveler.

The martial arts and movie things are much easier to write about when I’m mostly stuck in one city but I don’t think I can completely turn my back on what Myriad Misadventures was originally about.

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