What Happened to the Summer of ACTION?! and Other Notes

Okay, so the Summer of ACTION! didn't turn out quite the way I'd hoped.

Though the umbrella project featuring everything from comics and action flicks to vintage TV and men's adventure novels started strong (and with the best of intentions), by August the real world had intervened and while I kept reading and watching I never quite found the time to write. Add in a week without internet (due to the hurricane) and several extended beach trips and well, you know how it goes.

So, what happens now? Does the SoA! come to an end? Get "retired" like an assassin whose conscience is getting to him? Do we put it on ice – like Dolph Lundgren in the snappy action flick UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION – only to thaw it out next June in the hopes that the intervening months haven't made it crazier than it already was?

Hell no.

Though it might be getting dark earlier and fall temperatures aren't far off, the Summer of ACTION! will continue. Like five o'clock, it's always summer somewhere.

So, what else is happening in the world of Exploitation Retrospect?

Work on our Revenge of Print edition is currently under way and thanks to a hard drive bulging with awesome contributions it's likely to be the biggest issue of ER ever produced. I still have some design decisions to shake out – particularly whether to go with a digest or full-size layout – but we're still on track to have the issue wrapped up before the end of 2011.

I've also decided to make some changes in how reviews appear both on this blog and at our site. Recent discussions with a friend who is just tackling the whole blog thing made me realize that I've been keeping one foot in "traditional" publishing for far too long.

The original ER website was put together in the mid-to-late 1990s and my approach to it shows. With the current "system" I gather reviews as they come in from contributors and update the site (when time allows) with a couple dozen reviews. In other words, the site has become a bit like the zine that led to its creation – no real deadline for publication and it only gets worked on when I have a huge block of time to handle the formatting, linking and updating of the home page.

It finally dawned on me that nobody ever said I had to wait till I had two dozen reviews to update the site, that all the new reviews had to go up at once, or that I couldn't roll reviews out here on the blog first.

Hopefully, this change in approach will lead to a couple things. First, reviews of new releases will appear here and on the site in a more timely fashion. Second, the site will get updated more frequently. And, third, I won't have to make the foolhardy attempt to carve three or four hours out of a weekend in order to do a sweeping site update.

That's about all for now. Thanks for your continued support of this blog and the site!