Anyone paying attention may have noticed that it’s been a while since I last updated things around here - and even longer since I last put any serious effort into writing a new review.
The truth is, as much as I love delving into the past and reliving these shows that I have such fond memories of from childhood, the demands of being a 32 year-old adult haven’t exactly made it easy to do so.
Add full-time work into the general rigorous of being a -ahem- grownup, and there just hasn’t been an awful lot of time left. Worse, even when there was time, there just wasn’t the energy resources available for me to sit here and go through the somewhat gargantuan task of publishing a new Retro Pro Wrestling review.
And believe me, there are times when it does feel gargantuan. This is my normal process for reviewing a new show for this blog:
- Watch the show - just generally watch it, take it in, write down a few notes and make a few more notes mentally - 3 hours
- Put the show on again, only this time have it mostly in the background as I write the review - 3 hours
- Another hour of going through the show again, taking screen grabs, and adding them into the blog - 1 hour
- General formatting, spell checking (I’m aware I miss lots of stuff out), publishing, tweeting - 30 minutes.
That’s seven and a half hours - basically a full working day.
More often than not, finding a time when I could block out a full working day to work on what was essentially a hobby wasn’t all that easy to do.
So, what am I getting at? Is this my last hoorah? Am I closing this blog down or -worse- am I leaving it to languish, untouched and without updates like so many abandoned blogs that litter the web?
Not exactly.
You see, a few months ago, I hit a bout of depression and became quite ill. Don’t worry, it happens more than I care to admit. During my ‘recovery’ period, one of the things I did was fire up some old World Wrestling Federation Pay Per Views.
I actually watched the shows that I should have been writing about for RPW (at the time, a bunch of stuff from the latter part of 1996), but without the added pressure of having to take notes and remember stuff so that I could then fire up the laptop and write about them.
You know what? Just doing that made me feel good. OK, not good enough to complete relieve me of the burden of depression, but enough to provide some sort of temporary respite, which -at the time- was good enough for me.
It felt good to just get back to the very reason why I started this blog in the first place -to share my love of pro wrestling as I remember it, and, yes, to complete that mad goal I set myself to review every single WWE PPV from Wrestlemania 1 - 30.
That whole experience made me want to give this another go, but I knew that if I was going to do it, I would have to do it differently. I couldn’t just dive right back in and pretend like nothing happened.
So I took a step back, and really thought about what I wanted to do with Retro Pro Wrestling. I gave myself a break from this blog and for all intents and purposes, I’m still technically on that break.
In the next few weeks, I’m planning to do something of a reboot. The old content will still be there, but I’m going to spruce up the design and approach this with a new, manageable schedule.
My goal so far is to start adding new content from the first weekend in February, committing to no more than one new PPV review per month, with other stuff like the magazine reviews I did fitting in around that.
It’ll be interesting, and I’ve got some work to do, but it’s about time I started to enjoy Retro Pro Wrestling again, and I hope you enjoy it too.
To keep updated on when I’m back with new content and such, please do follow me on Twitter at @retropwrestling. Other than that, I just want to say thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing my pro wrestling reviews with you again soon.
Chris.
