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Monday! And/or October 1st! (There was some mild confusion so I’m maybe posting early, dunno.)

In the beginning, there is a writer. The internet serves as his whiteboard. I began in forums, putting in my two cents wherever I found a field with a submit button. Soon after, I migrated to the “professional” gaming sites on the internet. IGN, Massively, Polygon, others. Taking to the comments section is a task for only the more hardened and prepared internet adventurers. I could write better articles than these chumps, I was sure of it.

Back in the day… When I started blogging, it was after the WAR Blogger train had already left the station. Hell it was after the first three months of WAR and most of the servers started their long inevitable process of dying out. All those blogs that had been fired up and rearing to chop turned their gaze to other shiny things. I was just getting started. After inheriting a several hundred member Destro guild, I needed a way to stay invested. I started writing about mechanics and systems in the game, short guides, reviews of classes, patch notes, whatever I could get my hands on.

Two years of that before I wandered off for something else, and it was my best two years as a blogger by far. Lately I’ve been wandering, mostly writing about D&D as it’s what I do most frequently. I participated in the NBI last year, there’s a handful posts about it under the Newbie Blogger Initiative tag. Also there’s my thing about being a good Twit that’s still mostly valid. I believe this is but one facet of what you’re getting into when you start blogging. There’s a community to interact with as well.

Community can be a delightful thing. Lots of us tend to feed off each other with ideas and posts. Interpretation of the gaming news cycle often has far more than your two-sided view in our national politics. Soliciting for help in figuring out the answer to a problem, well that’s more like rolling the dice, but better chances than not doing anything at all. Also, having people read your rambling, it’s a kind of validation. Maybe compensating for some deficiency elsewhere, I don’t know. I’m not here to judge.

I am here to encourage you! Blogging has changed my life. I’m not sure how much, or if it was worth it, but it’s an experience. I would rate it a 3.5 out of 5 stars for recreational activity, I prefer to play games nowadays than write about them. Some of us have this deep desire to expunge the words from our minds and hork them onto the internet. It’s almost an irrational need at this point, closing in on 300 posts over several years time.

Would I start a blog from scratch right now if I hadn’t blogged before? That’s an interesting question that you must be asking yourself. Yes. Yes you should, right now, sign up for an account on Blogger or WordPress or something and just get started. Your blog might be an unnoticed hole in the ground for months before you start getting traction, but treat it like a sapling and watch it grow. Try not to catch it on fire, they’re prone to fire. Eventually you might look back on it, tall, majestic, scarred from the bottom up, with a sense of prideful ownership. One day I hope to do the same.