Happy half-birthday to Gena Watches Things
Celebrating six glorious months of enjoying the sound of my own voice.
This will be a relatively short newsletter today, to mark six! whole! months! since I started this thing, somehow defying my legendary self-destructive habits.
It is not the second, or third, or even fourth time I’ve tried to regularly maintain writing for an audience. My longest streak was back in the halcyon days of LiveJournal, where I got my first delicious taste of writing for other people. It was great, but it also was kind of awful, because in being keenly aware that you have an audience, you (and when I say you, I mean me, but I also believe this is true for nearly everyone) find yourself writing more for approval than anything else. For a long time, I adopted a persona that didn’t really reflect who I was in real life, because it seemed to land better with people. As things were starting to come apart in my personal life, I needed that approval from veritable strangers, and it became an unpleasant cycle of both feeling like I had to be “on” all the time, and not feeling as if I could talk about the things that were really going on, because who wanted to hear that nonsense?
Thank god we all learned from that mistake, and now we’re all totally honest on social media about who we are and what our lives are like, amirite? Anyway.
With the rise of microblogging, I moved away from writing that required me to create a false image, and began to focus on pop culture. Though the time when it was possible to earn a fruitful living writing about movies and TV had already passed, I had vague designs on “doing something” with the stuff I wrote. It was pretty funny. People seemed to like it. But I had (and still don’t!) no ability to sell myself, let alone “network,” a word that makes me cringe at the mere thought of it. Even just posting links to my writing feels intrusive, like that scene in The Critic where Jay Sherman has a cardboard cutout of himself that yells “Buy my book! Buy my book! Buy my book!” I’d hear stories about people aggressively pursuing writing gigs, and how editors don’t like that kind of thing, and yet, it also seemed to work too? I had no idea how to strike a balance between mousy and pushy.
And then a friend of mine who ran a pop culture website reached out and asked if I wanted to come write for him, and suddenly I was actually a “real” writer. Then he started a new site and brought me on as an editor, and suddenly I was actually a “real” editor. A very small potatoes one that still has to beg and plead for invitations to screenings, but nonetheless. And then I started getting press credentials for festivals, and as of last week I’m a member of the Critics Circle Association, which I guess is kind of a big deal. I recognize a lot of the names of the other critics in it, even though they almost certainly have never heard of me.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it’s taken me a long time to feel like I can say this is something I do because I’m good at it, and not just because I like entertaining people. I’ve always been averse to referring to myself as a “critic,” because I have no formal education in film criticism, and my knowledge of film is sorely lacking in many areas. As my Twitter bio says, I just like movies, man, and I like writing about them. Getting a tiny crumb of attention for it is just the gravy on top.
Though I won’t tell you what my subscriber number is, lest anyone feel like popping my bubble of delusion, I will say that it’s better than I had envisioned, and grows week by week. This is exciting, because yay, audience!, but also a little anxiety-inducing, because the pressure is on to keep up with it, and also, frankly, a little saddening: why is it so hard to put myself out there? Who cares? There are, quite frankly, many writers more successful than me whose writing is like the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, but there they are, and here I am, still mostly under the radar. Things could have been different. Getting into Critics Choice is really cool, but I could have been in it ten years ago.
Anyway, enough with the kvetching. I am grateful for those of you who subscribed, and, more amazingly, those of you who pledged that if I ever decided to start asking for money for this thing you’ll pony up some dough. The experiment has been successful so far, and I have a long list of ideas I hope to cover here, as long as I can stay out of my own way. That’s the hard part, you know?
Happy half-birthday to Gena Watches Things
As said friend who saw your potential very early on, and who sees just how far you've come (esp. with this Subtack, which contains some of your very best writing to date!), I'm so so glad you've stuck it out with this, with me, Kill By Kill, all your other efforts. You may not feel like a real "critic" some days, but there are plenty of times i read something you write and think "fuck, why can't *I* write like *that*?" A testament to your greatness, and I hope with the access CCA gives you, more people will see it. You deserve it.
you get the ronnie gardocki seal of approval