Trent goes off-topic

Greetings, all!

This site started out as a list of books on Geocities. It has evolved and grown, year after year (or most years, anyway), and eventually, for blog fodder and my own amusement, I started adding reviews and some coverage of crime fiction and film beyond things directly related to Parker or Donald Westlake. But everything added was at least in the same universe as these subjects if I squinted a bit. And people seemed to enjoy these digressions.

However, I frequently found myself with the urge to write about things that it was impossible to rationalize squeezing in here. I think what finally set me off was Paperbacks from Hell, my favorite book of last year, which is a great, beautiful, and hilarious look at horror paperbacks of the 70s and 80s. I tried to come up with an angle by which I could allow myself to cover it–lots of crime fiction novels are published as paperback originals! But I just couldn’t come up with a way that would make sense within the already-stretched boundaries I have established here, even though I think most of our readers would really enjoy the book.

So I decided to launch a side blog for things that are off-topic. It is called Trent Goes Off-topic. It will mostly be book, movie, and music reviews. It will be a considerably less formal affair than VWOP–I want to have fun writing for it, and I don’t want it to become a massive time-suck. (I have fun working on VWOP, but it most definitely is a massive time-suck.) I might post there daily. I might post there weekly. I might post there monthly. I’m not going to be too concerned about it.

I have two posts up so far, an introductory post and a review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which I finally saw last night. I do not yet have a review of Paperbacks from Hell up. I’ll need to reread that first, which will be a pleasure.

I’ll probably link to new posts there within the weekly roundup post here.

Anyway, I hope you’ll drop by the new digs and say hello. If you forget the URL, it’s linked in both the top menu and the sidebar.

Also: Now is a great time to remind everybody that co-blogger Nick also has another site, Existential Ennui, where he mostly covers books but has occasional forays into other media. His site is also linked in both the top menu and the sidebar, and I will also probably start linking to his new posts when I do the weekly roundup.