EUOL Posts
Be Afraid!
It's amazing how such interesting topics can pop up without my even noticing them. Let's talk about a few things. First, I feel a need to explain to all of you why exactly my article writing declined starting in September of last year.
Originally, I was on track for two-to-three articles a week. This was a large work-load, even when I wasn't in school. I kept it up for a year or so, however, building our webcomic base--which appears to still be one of our sections that gets the most outside notice. There was one big problem with webcomics, however--I read them when I had discretionary time. Writing a good webcomics article required a huge time investment, as it required one to read through much (if not all) of the archives in order to have a good view of the comic as a whole.
When I entered grad school, I discovered I just didn't have time to read webcomics. This goes double for drawing my own, which just demanded too much of my discretionary time for me to justify when compared to my writing career and my schooling. This left Magic, which to be honest, I felt that our input on this area was relatively unwanted, since we didn't play to the community that would read Magic articles. (Fell and I had several good discussions about this.) Unfortunately, this left me with only the 'free stuff' section, which never really had a strong identity in the first place. Therefore, my article writing languished.
I tried to combat this by jumping to a new section--one that I knew I would be involved with no matter how busy my life became: books. I consider myself a professional author, and may very well soon have some legitimacy to the claim. I figured that this was an area that I actually had some credibility in, as opposed to webcomics, which I just kind of jumped into. So, I suggested Evil Storytime--which I still think was a great idea. I also suggested the 'build an RPG' series of articles because I thought that it would add some interesting and original content. I didn't think I'd be any better at building a paper-based RPG than anyone else, but I thought it would be a series of original articles that would inspire repeat readership, and when it was done would offer a downloadable product (which is always good--people love free stuff.)
Unfortunately, Sprig already pointed out what happened here. I really did feel that I had no support for what I was trying. Evil Storytime died because Fell refused to read the book that we were supposed to be reviewing. The RPG series received little attention, and I was politely informed that it was hardly original, that many sites offered free RPGs, and that I really didn't know enough about the genre to have anything relevant to say.
Now, those things very well might be true. I didn't take them with any bitterness--in fact, my inborn laziness said 'Great! Now I don't have to write anything.' This obviously was not the best response, but hey, at least I tried, right?
Yes, TWG is a hobby for me. However, pretty much everything except my writing (including grad school) is a hobby for me. I would like to see TWG progress. I’ve kind of moved beyond the ‘free stuff’ aspect of the site, though I do use it on resumes. I also see something in the future that will, perhaps, better tie me to TWG and increase its readership. As has been discussed, I’ll probably be releasing a book with TOR sometime next year. It has been recommended to me that I begin thinking about my own professional website as an author. Most have them, you probably know.
I would likely link to TWG from my site. In fact, I would probably tell them that I write book reviews and frequent the forum at the TWG. Rather than having my own forum, I might ask Fell if I could have a section at the TWG. I’m not sure how many hits authors sites get, I expect it has to do with their popularity, but I could see this siphoning some new readership to the TWG (if, in fact, Fell wants the association.)
