The Once Monthly is one year old. So what exactly have I learned from all this?

It's a challenge figuring out what your readers are interested in, just as the platform you chose seemingly starts to fall apart. Also, happy first birthday to the Once Monthly.

First off, happy new year to you—and I hope 2024 would be good to you the way I hope it is good to me. Or something.

This month marks the first anniversary of the Once Monthly. The birthday technically falls on the 16th, but I sent out a pre-launch introductory playlist two weeks before, so let’s just go with the month.

Anyway, my plan is to do a process post, one year in. Sure, this project is the spiritual successor of earthings!, the music blog which I ran from 2012 to 2019, but running the two are different. That one updated daily; this one updates at least once monthly, although in practice I do it roughly twice a month. That one is more of a journalistic endeavor; this one is more of a personal essay thing. (Yes, I arrived at the whole “I write about what resonates with me” on the old blog, but what else explains all that talk of a break-up?) Perhaps more importantly, that one had a smaller social media footprint—just one Twitter, err, X account—while this one has covered all bases. And even then being seen is more difficult nowadays, because social media just feels more toxic and one-sided and at the behest of billionaires.

I wasn’t expecting social media reach to be my biggest challenge in the first year of the Once Monthly. Yes, this is a personal writing project above all else, but it never hurt a writer to know that their words are seen by people, and especially those beyond their immediate circle. But then, Elon Musk configured Twitter (err, X) to treat links to Substack domains as suspicious. Add to that the fact that people are leaving that site and most of my few followers are spam accounts to adult sites, and, well, there goes my reach. Not even my workaround works, too.

And then Substack itself got embroiled in its own issues, ultimately because it was no longer content with being just a publishing platform, but a social media site, too. I won’t dwell much on the whole Substack-is-happy-to-profit-from-Nazis issue because I don’t have anything new to say, but I feel frustrated because I now feel I will be judged for staying. And I’m staying because the Once Monthly is designed as (mostly) an email newsletter, and I want to reach as many people as possible, and frankly, I don’t want to start from scratch again. Can’t I do this for seven years like the last one—preferably without being told I support extreme views because I don’t say otherwise?

That’s not to mention the other challenges Substack is throwing at me on the Once Monthly’s first year. The platform is very much biased towards the Western hemisphere, for one. Notes has been a good way to reach potential readers, but it’s most active after my dinner time, and I don’t want to stay up past midnight just to promote myself. It will always feel like I’m butting into someone else’s conversations, and expected to get it all and have a say. It’s really why I still use other social media platform to hopefully snag some eyeballs.

Also, I’m honestly not firm on what direction the Once Monthly should take. I’m not a journalist like

Tamar Herman

or

K-Culture with Jae-Ha Kim

—they’re known names among K-pop followers, but would you believe I only came across them in 2023?—and I don’t think I count as a personal essayist either, because my stories aren’t as interesting as, say,

Annabel Port

’s. (Again, all that talk of the break-up. I am still working on my tendency to trauma-dump here.) Writing about the music I like at a given moment is easy—and I could do what

The Music Swap

does, but again, they already do that—but fusing those two aforementioned elements is quite difficult. I think I only got that mix right in the last two playlists—my mini-dive into GFriend’s discography in Playlist #11, or my riff on Hong Kong’s many changes in Playlist #12.

Cultural criticism? I haven’t really embraced that before, but I realize that the stuff I was most satisfied about have been about television: my dive into Philippine noontime shows masquerading as a Hyperfocus essay, for example, or my reviews of Voltes V: Legacy and The Summer I Turned Pretty. None of those were in my plans when the Once Monthly first came together, but it’s clearly part of the mix now. (Same with my unexpected focus on music in anime, although that’s my interests talking.) I just was never confident enough in embracing the journalist side of things, even if I fashioned myself as one before.

Yeah, a lot of this are internalized concerns of a typical writer, I suppose, but this has been fun, nonetheless. I get to kind of fulfill two childhood fantasies—start a publication and, through the playlists, become a music programmer on the radio—and tackling these challenges are fun to the point that it’s no longer just a distraction.

So here’s what I’ll do. I’ll… continue figuring things out. The Once Monthly’s format may be steady, but what’s inside will continue to evolve. The personal essay part will stay in essence, but I think I will highlight Filipino music and pop culture whenever appropriate. Niches matter after all, judging from the smattering of Japanese music publications hosted on here. I’m also inspired by how effortlessly Jae-ha has merged her K-drama reviews with insights into Korean culture and her own experiences.

To that end, I’m working on a new feature—likely monthly, but we’ll see how much I can commit—highlighting new album releases here in the Philippines, which is a good way to dive back into the reviews I used to do without having to (fully) pretend that I’m a critic that knows it all. I’m also planning a new occasional series that centers on my personal stories but still done through a musical prism. Fingers crossed I’ll have the energy to get those going in the next twelve months.

As for you, in the off chance you’ve gotten this far, what do you want to see in the Once Monthly? Let’s go all in—I want to know your thoughts and I’ll see if it’s something we can all play with. Comment here, or email me at nicksyoncemonthly@gmail.com.

One more thing: I mentioned in the last playlist that I am moving my playlist release dates to the second Friday of each month, rather than the third Monday. It’s not much of a change, but the idea of the songs I write about accompanying you during the weekend is appealing. So you can expect Playlist #13 to be in your inboxes and online on 12 January. You’ll definitely hear about it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Threads.

It’s only proper that I leave you with a song after all this. While writing this I was rewatching the anime series Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill—it’s on Netflix on my side of the world, and probably on Crunchyroll where you are—and its ending theme, performed by cast member Yuma Uchida, is as carefree and bouncy as the series.

All right. Thank you again for being part of the Once Monthly’s ride—and I’ll see you in less than a fortnight.