Open Water

The proliferation of so many unfunny, funny blogs must certainly be a sign of the coming blogopolypse. Miss Missives decreed it in her last few reviews and now it's official:

Blogging truth #37- Any blog that has 'humor' in the title will not have humor in the content.

Angry Seafood: An Original Humor Blog, is where Chris goes to get his write on. Contrary to what people might think, Miss Missives doesn't want to be unnecessarily cruel. I'm not here with the intent of crushing Chris's spirit like I'm the pointy stiletto and he's the soft, furry gerbil. Unlike so many of the tools I've come across lately, Chris doesn't blog to blog. It's clear he actually enjoys his blog and tries to be clever, witty, a little offbeat and funny. It's just not hitting the mark.

Here are the things I take issue with:
1.If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! Vote for me on humor blogs. Want to be on my blogroll? How about a reciprocal link, want to twitter me, twatter me? It's enough to give Miss Missives a gigantic, temple pulsing, sinus ripping, anvil to the back of the head migraine. Guess what, these are gimmicks and if your writing is good, you don't need them. I understand wanting to utilize available tools to get people reading your stuff but how much is too much?

2.An original humor blog? This has been done more times than the Dirty Pirate Hooker, and better. For the joke to work you have to set it up right.
Him: Would you like to dance?
Her: No.
Him: No, what I said was you look fat in those pants.

The crux of the joke is that "want to dance" sounds vaguely like "fat in those pants," one does not work without the other. Plus, she's wearing a skirt in the illustration.

Again, this is just a reworking of something that wasn't that great to begin with. This is okay, but again, it's been done better. There is quite a bit of recycled pilfered jokes here, and really, it's material that isn't even worth lifting.

3.Not to split hairs, but as to this from his About page:

“I am a professional aspiring freelance writer”

You are either a professional freelance writer or an aspiring freelance writer but you are not a professional aspiring freelance writer.

4.The writing is clunky. For example:

"I guess that is like saying there is humor in a funeral or a car crash. But more like a train wreck, these two complete pieces of entertainment crap were what we had for choices to spend our recreational time on this weekend."

"If the Back to the Future franchise, one that is a tenth as valuable as the Star Wars one had the decency to try and maintain some kind of coherent continuity, what does that say about Lucas?"

"The other night I realized why and I have it down to two things: reality television and bad movies late at night."

"I have tried not to see Batman and Robin because of my weakness and my fears were confirmed."

"Polygamists from Little House on the Prairie, Texas headed into the big city where the cement walkers live Friday to face the courts in a child custody case.

You say you're all about the writing but when I started slogging through it, the most recent posts were not at all focused on writing. You have a list of popular television shows that had been published elsewhere with a small amount of static commentary from you. You have an interview where you ask many of the questions you ask in all the interviews. You have an announcement of contest winners. There's more of an interview, then finally a small piece of writing/commentary and the setup for a contest. Snore. I looked through no less than thirty posts and I just couldn't find any winners. The best posts on this site are the interviews with other bloggers . The questions are generally the same from interview to interview but some of the subjects are funny.

Now that Miss Missives has made chowder out of you, how about the good news? This was okay and Miss Missives knows you're trying. This was pretty funny, though it could be amped up with some additional examples and editing. There was one thing about Angry Seafood I really liked, the template. The colors, design, layout, and font size makes this easy on the eyes if not belly achingly funny. Your header is unique, the blues and greens are nice to look at and you've made good use of tabs. The only thing I would change is add a drop down archive and clean up your sidebar.

I don't want to discourage you because I know you are very serious about trying to develop as a writer. As far as constructive advice, I can offer a little. One, spend less time on quantity and more time on quality. You need to clean up your writing after you get it down. You need to look it over and ask yourself, "how can I make this more clear." If this writing thing is something you really want to do, I would suggest taking a creative writing course. Your writing needs fine-tuning, it needs polish, flow and you need feedback.

Meh-diocre

Nothing to write home about dear.