Now Playing: The Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon

By S.T. VanAirsdale

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend at the Woodstock Film Festival about some story ideas. A couple of them had nothing to do with movies, but I was having difficulty placing them on a freelance basis. "Just publish them on The Reeler," he said.

"What?" I replied.

"If you need a break, maybe your readers need a break, too," he said.

So is born the Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon, my first effort at running one of these things and (hopefully) a useful diversion for film bloggers and film blog readers who feel like mixing a little variety into their days. But, you know, on their respective film blogs. It starts pretty much now and runs through Nov. 1, which will hopefully provide enough time for shellshocked bloggers to work out some more mass-culture alternatives to their regular beats. Based on counsel from far wiser colleagues, I'm only establishing a couple of parameters:

1) Authors should either be publishers of or contributors to a regularly updated film blog (In other words: You should have something to want a break from);

2) Entries must not address subjects related to filmgoing, filmmaking, film criticism, film news or anything else film-related (television is OK);

3) Everything else is fair game.

As I've told others, the idea is to aggregate a collection of what we think about when we're not thinking about film. I think it'll be fun. I've gone ahead and fired the first shot with this appreciation of Dionne Warwick. Yes, you read correctly.

Send your own links my way -- stv [AT] thereeler.com -- to include your posts in the blog-a-thon, and please get in touch as well with any suggestions. Thanks in advance for your participation!

Posted at October 24, 2007 10:50 AM