Blaugust 2019: Introducing This Blog
Greetings to those of you discovering my blog for the first time through the pulse of Blaugust! I spent some time going through the list of bloggers participating and adding folks to my Feed Reader and following via WordPress when I could.
Since there are some new faces, I wanted to take time to introduce myself and my blog, and talk just a bit about how it came to be and why it is the way it is.
Hello!
I’m a middle-aged gal gamer and technical writer by trade. I’ve been writing (fiction) since I was old enough to make up stories, and have carried that with me throughout my life. I was first introduced to the Internet back in 1997-1998, and being the tech geek I was, fell in love with the concept and idea that one could connect with so many different people on the other side of the screen.
Naturally, I began posting writing online, to an old Geocities account. This was mostly fanfic (which I didn’t know had the name fanfic) that I’d written long-hand in my young teens and stuffed in a box under my bed for years. That story still exists online… but that’s not important. What is important is that from the moment I understood what the Internet could do, I was posting writing to it in some format.
Short History of Me on the Interwebs
Eventually, Geocities gave way to other less tedious means of communication (meaning you didn’t have to know how to code HTML to post stuff), and things like LiveJournals became popular. I’ll say that’s probably the first blog-format type writing I did. It’s all long-gone now, and I’m not sure it even called itself a “blog,” but it cemented the idea that hosted websites could give writers a CMS environment to post their thoughts online.
Eventually I installed my own WordPress – it was a very small and personal blog, and I don’t even recall what it was named or that it had any function. The only thing I do remember is that it taught me to never post too detailed information about yourself/job/family online!
I recall one day being shocked that someone had Googled a certain phrase that was related to my job, and it took them to my blog because I’d mentioned something about it in a post about a work conference. While there was nothing bad in that post, it shook me – I didn’t realize Google had such deep-reaching abilities until then. I’ve always been the type to separate my RL from my net life, so while nothing came of it, it was rather uncomfortable, and I learned that lesson. Hence why you don’t see much about my RL in this blog.
How This Blog Came To Be
The story of how this blog came to be is too long to tell, even if I could remember it rightly. I’ve had so many blogs over the years that I don’t remember the half of them. But what they taught me was this: When I try to focus on just one topic and don’t have any flexibility, that blog will fail.
I know a lot of times you hear about people telling you to find your niche and things like that when it comes to blogging. I tried that. I tried it over and over. I’ve had blogs about webcomic making, fiction writing, specific gaming, RP characters, fitness, etc. None of them made it.
The reason why?
I discovered over the course of the years that I need to be able to write about what’s inspiring me from day to day. While this blog often focuses on my main MMO – FFXIV – I also love to write about an awesome Steam or Switch game that blew me away. Or maybe I want to talk about RL with my cats (doesn’t happen often, but I have). Or about progress I am (or not) making with learning to play violin. Maybe I’m into learning Blender and creating content for Second Life…
Whatever my creative spark, that’s what I want to talk about in a post. It seems simple, but so many writers paint themselves into a corner by dedicating a blog to just one game or topic. And then, when life changes or they’ve lost interest, that blog suddenly falls to the wayside. It’s not their fault or the blog’s fault, it’s just life!
So when I created this blog, I left it wide open as a “Gaming and Geek” blog to talk about whatever pleases me. I consider it a hobby blog, and I used my Internet handle as the name. Sometimes I’m a little regretful of that, but at this point, it is what it is.
Even this blog has gone through several changes. It was rebranded and moved from self-hosted to WP hosted (which I don’t regret). But for now, I feel like it’s pretty well settled where it is.
Anyhow, if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this ramble, congrats! Have a cookie! And if you have any questions for me about my blog or my processes, feel free to leave a comment!