from the part time retail job I’ve held while trying to finish school. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. That means it’s been nearly six years since I uprooted myself and moved from America’s humid crotch to a place that actually has four seasons. In a week my girlfriend/editor/co-game-designer/artist/general-partner-in-crime and I will celebrate our four year anniversary.
Time is a funny thing. Never there when you need it, always slipping away when you least expect it. I stopped writing when I was about sixteen or so because my work just couldn’t live up to my expectations. I was just competent enough not to fall into the Dunning Kruger effect, but not competent enough to rise above it. It took another fifteen years to garner the life experience to understand why, and what it was lacking. When I was young, I thought I’d be a writer by a young age. Now I’m looking at the ripe old age of 32 heading towards me on the horizon, while still struggling to finish my four year degree that I ran out of money for back in 2003 and working a minimum wage job just because it’s the only thing I’ve found that fits around my schedule.
But around that schedule, I’ve continued with my game design. And I’ve started writing again. I’m finally actually doing the things that I started doing as a child, and eventually grew to love doing to the point where I’d hoped to make a career out of it.
I still have that hope, hence why I bought this domain name and started writing here. I hardly wrote a word for fifteen years, and yet looking back, I realize that the entire time I still thought of myself as a writer. A writer who just wasn’t writing, which always seemed a bit fraudulent to me. And the moment I put pen to paper again (figuratively speaking. I have terrible handwriting, but can type 120 WPM easily) it just reaffirmed it. I’ve been a writer my whole life. My half-a-lifetime hiatus didn’t change that. At the time, I couldn’t see how I could call myself a writer when I wasn’t writing. Hell, I still feel like I was being a fraud for all that time. And I lament all the time I spent not practicing my craft.
But looking back, I can’t help but notice all the times I found some excuse to expound upon whatever it was going on in my life. Even if I knew no one would read it, I posted long notes on facebook detailing the methods I used for brewing mead. I wrote a blog about beer tasting, even though I’ll be the first to admit that my taste for beers is usually limited to the strong and dark. I tried my hand at doing video game reviews online. I started writing sourcebooks for the pen and paper role playing games that I’d been developing.
But that wasn’t enough to feed the itch. Now the stories are being written again.
Now I just need to make the transition from ‘writer’ to ‘published writer’.