Today's Review: A Review A Day

Well, this is awkward. For a blog named "A Review A Day" there seems to be a significant amount of days now without a review. I'll preface this by saying I'm fine, nothing traumatic has occurred to explain my absence. On the flip side, I haven't been off sunning myself in an exotic location either. I'm afraid the reasons for my lapse in reviewing are fairly mundane. Life has simply caught up with me lately.

Those of you who read my reviews daily (there may be a few of you out there) may have noticed over the last month or so that I've had periods of a few days where I've failed to write anything, only to catch up after the fact. Even then, my reviews have been brief, uninteresting, mundane. Simply put, I've been ticking boxes. Phoning it in. 

I started A Review A Day over seven years ago, a young man with a semblance of a dream to become a writer. I worked in Blockbuster at the time, and watched a hell of a lot of movies, alongside my hobby of eating a hell of a lot of food. So I figured the best way to hone my writing chops would be to write a load of reviews, the daily element just clicked one day, and off I went, not knowing that it would lead me on a non-stop seven year reviewing journey. 

I've reviewed through good times and bad. I've lined up a week's worth of reviews to publish autonomously while I've been on holiday. I posted reviews while my baby daughter stayed in the ICU, and once later on while I applied pressure to her almost-severed finger in a hospital waiting room (keep your hands away from doors, kids!) I've written some reviews drunk, some half-asleep, some on trains, some in the middle of nowhere. I've received care packages, interesting products, I've been invited to press events where I didn't feel I belonged. I've been accepted into the fold of snack food bloggers (there's a lot of great ones out there, check them out for all your foodie needs). I've even received fan mail. It's been surreal at times.

At first I was full of ideas, I loved coming up with unique concepts and doing in-depth analyses of mundane things. After a few years I settled pretty wholly into snack foods. They were quick to write and delicious to eat. Well, some of them. But therein lies the problem. Naming the blog "A Review A Day" backed me into a corner from the start, I set myself a deadline out of the gate. Quick, easy reviews were the best way to reaach that deadline, and although I loved hunting down new and interesting foods (and still do), there are only so many ways I can say something is delicious, or disgusting, or somewhere in the middle. I may be consistent, but I'm a little stagnant. 

They say all good things must come to an end. I've contemplated it for a while now, and was waiting for some mind of nice rounding off point. I was hoping to reach my eighth anniversary, or my 3,000th review, but they're still a ways off. But family, career, general life have gotten in the way of me consistently cranking out a review every single day, and finally letting go of that daily deadline has alleviated my overall stress levels. So here I am, signing off. 

Wow, that's a lot of writing there. I'm a modest man, I'd be the first to say I'm not sure anyone will read this, but I know I have some fans out there, and I want to thank you all for accompanying me on this awesome journey. Just know that this is not the end, just the end of A Review A Day. I may yet come back with more reviews in a different form, and hopefully a more creative one. I may establish some other form of blog, I've toyed with a few ideas in the past, and letting go of this may allow me to focus on other projects in the future. Thanks to all my readers, you're all amazing.

My rating: 5/5