A New Year, A New Direction

It hit me today that if I had left Indiedoodle with no new posts for another 2 more months, it would’ve been a whole year since I last updated.

I actually had a new year’s post drafted back in January, but I totally neglected this blog and never really completed that entry and now it’s too long overdue for it to have any relevance at all.

Such long breaks between entries should come as no surprise for those of you who are still following this blog (and for that I humbly thank you), but I’ve actually been wondering for the longest time what made me lose my motivation to update this blog and I think I’ve arrived at a conclusion.

Despite my professional life and my obstinance in making comics on the side while balancing my relationships with others, I realized that one of the main reasons why I don’t update as much as I’d like to is because of the standards I set for myself when I first started on this blog: That this blog would function as a sort of an online magazine, focused mainly on the comic happenings in and around Malaysia, and occasionally around the world.

Once that outline had been laid out, I decided that I had to keep the language ‘professional’, ergo being less personal and more upbeat, with fewer personal opinions thrown into the mix (comic reviews nonwithstanding).

However, now I realize that that definition has worked against me as almost everything I post on this blog is wholly based on what I know as an individual, things I have stumbled upon that have piqued my personal interest.

At first I thought of casting a wider net to include other things, like other events in Malaysia that are only loosely associated with comics as well as local comic publications that I would not otherwise buy except for review purposes, but then I realized that it would be a futile effort as I was effectively running this blog singlehandedly and the money I’d be spending on those books would be coming out of my own pockets.

So I decided to review things that I bought for myself, or books that I could borrow from the library, and cover events and people that I had access to. That worked for a spell, but then I realized that most of the books I was reviewing weren’t exactly made by Malaysians, or even from around the South-East Asian region (which is really ironic considering the tagline for this blog!).

I realised that the harder I tried to deliberately find ‘Malaysian-ness’ in the things I wanted to put up on this blog, the less likely I would be able to find it, much less enjoy the process of writing about it. I effectively ended up being unable to gush about things I loved, simply because I was trying too hard to stick to the boundaries I had set for myself and this blog.

As such, dear readers, I have decided to redefine the scope of this blog. From now on, I will be running Indiedoodle very much like a personal blog, with a focus on comics and comic-related things that I am able to experience and make time for, which may or may not have a Malaysian element to it (unless you count the fact that I’m Malaysian to begin with and everything has been filtered through Malaysian eyes!). As most of you should know by now, I flit between Malaysia and Singapore, so that’s where the events I’ll mostly be writing about will be taking place. I have some big ideas for Indiedoodle which I intend to work on, time permitting, as my pursuits in making comics are taking up most of my personal time (among other things). I don’t intend to use Indiedoodle as a platform to promote my own work, but in the interest of full disclosure I thought it was something that I should put out there first. If you are interested to find out about my work and such, you can just drop me a comment or tweet me, whichever works!

Thank you for reading this entry and sticking around for as long as you have. I will strive to maintain Indiedoodle better than I have before.

P/S: I will be using Twitter from now on for updates on local (meaning Malaysia and Singapore) events instead of making entries as a time saving measure (unless the event requires further elaboration),  as well as other interesting things that might not make it onto the blog, so please follow @indiedoodle if you’re interested in such updates!