The instability that struck Filmtracks in late 2017 has continued for nearly two years, the site still unable to find a permanent office and my writing schedule suffering greatly from commitments relating mainly to my primary day job. While Filmtracks is not in immediate danger of collapsing, its immediate future is not rosy.
The majority of the site's assets, including its CDs, equipment, furniture, and hard drives, remain in storage in Montana. Due to the strict rules of construction financing, work has not yet commenced on the site's planned, permanent office in Southworth, Washington. The site has been run from equipment I used to call "travel mode" for four years now.
More importantly, my current job with the City of Seattle has proven itself to require 50 hours of work per week, sometimes more. It's an extraordinarily time-consuming position, one that has left especially little time to write for Filmtracks since March. I will be eliminating my side work for my former Wyoming employer soon, so there is hope that I can regain some sanity after I free up those hours.
Readers should continue to expect tardy coverage as I endeavor to stabilize my work situation and get the construction of Filmtracks' new office finally started. After a strong start to 2019 for reviews, my writing time declined as my work schedule at Seattle expanded greatly, and that situation will likely persist through the remainder of the year as I coordinate the launch of an all-new website for the City's utilities.
Through June, only ten new reviews and 14 re-writes of existing reviews were completed. This pace is clearly suboptimum, and it looks very unlikely that I will meet my annual goals for writing this year. Revenue, meanwhile, is tepid, and the site continues to lose money. While I appreciate the donations from readers, I cannot expect such support with the limited review production as of late.
I am hoping for a turnaround at Filmtracks in 2020, including increased coverage and some tweaks to the Scoreboard software. In the meantime, I thank the site's regular readers and Scoreboard participants for sticking with me through these challenging years.
Christian
|