As regular readers will know, I currently work as an elementary school English teacher in South Korea. Yesterday was the last day of the first semester in my city, so i’m officially on summer break until September!!! Unfortunately, I only have about two weeks of actual vacation… I still have to go to school for the rest and do some work like summer camp and preparing for the second semester. BUT, I will have a lot more free time than I normally do! And I plan on investing a lot of it on some projects for this blog, so I thought I’d drop a quick update and let you know what’s going to happen.
Here are my priorities over the next six weeks:
- Keeping up to date with the latest comebacks and debuts. I’ve always tried to post my “Knee Jerk Reactions” within a week of the song’s release, but I’ve been falling further and further behind during all the end of semester craziness. I’m sure something similar will happen again once school resumes, but during the summer my first priority is to make reaction posts as quickly as possible. Hopefully, I can narrow down that turnaround to within a few days.
- The K-Pop Starter Kit column. I edited the first few posts for this month’s subject, and they should go up over the next couple of days. I still have to finish and revise the remaining ones, but I’m definitely going to get them all done by the end of July. I’m also organizing next month’s topic, which I’ll start working on soon and try to push out as quickly as possible during August. That way I can maybe get a head start on September’s so I don’t end up crunched for time again.
- TV Show Recaps. I always love writing these, but they’re practically impossible to do when I’m busy. One recap involves watching the episode and taking notes, writing the first draft, going back to make screenshots and GIFs, and then editing one more time before posting… so it can literally take hours to do. So one thing I want to do over the summer break is FINALLY get caught up on the recaps I’ve been planning.
- First up is finishing the Road to Kingdom recaps I was doing last year and then ended up delaying.
- Then, I want to move on to covering Kingdom! I confess I’ve already seen it because I didn’t want to be left out of the loop, but I’ve really been wanting to talk about it.
- I also just realized I have one last episode of Busted Season 2 in my drafts, so I’ll get that out ASAP. I do eventually plan to do Season 3, but that’s not high priority compared to the other more time-sensitive topics I’m writing about.
- I know JYP and P Nation currently have the survival show Loud together, and Girls Planet 999 is coming up too. I’m debating doing recaps for them, but I’ll have to see. Though if I have to choose, I’ll probably pick Girls Planet 999 since it feels like I’ve been writing about a lot of boy groups lately.
- Updating group profiles. I spent most of last year doing this, so I’ve been taking a break in favor of producing original content. But now a lot of the groups I have profiles on have made 2021 comebacks, so I should probably revisit them before they get too out of date. I already updated (G)I-DLE a while ago, so I’ll just go in order of who made comebacks so far this year starting with the earlier ones.
- The planned order is: WayV, NU’EST, Monsta X, EXO, TWICE, NCT Dream, BTS. After that, I’ll try to clean up some of the other profiles and add new information like solo releases and things like that. Plus update major news like military service, GFriend disbanding, GOT7 leaving JYP, etc.
- The overall NCT profile definitely needs some rearranging as well – especially since it seems to be my most popular one right now – but I’m waiting to see what the rest of their plans for this year look like. I’ve heard rumors of NCT 2021, so I’ll probably just hold off until that’s confirmed so I can avoid updating twice.
I can’t guarantee that I’ll get to everything on this list… now that I’m looking at it all written out, it seems pretty ambitious. Six weeks seems like a lot of time, but I know from experience that my projects almost always take longer than I think they will. However, I’m optimistic that I can make a good amount of progress in each of the four areas I’ve outlined. So, here’s to a fun and productive vacation!
Love,
Katherine 🙂
NOTE: Featured image is of TWICE during their “Alcohol Free” era, and the original was posted on their Twitter count. You can see the tweet here.
Katherine Does K-POP 