I’ll be honest: I’ve tried to write this page no less than 10 times and each just ends up sounding more bland than the last.
So I’m just going to write. And apologize ahead of time for any injuries it causes as your head crashes into your keyboard from boredom. Likely multiple times. Sorry about that!
There’s a lot of people out there that want to write for or about games. And a recurring theme seems to be the following statement, uttered in answer to the question “Why do you want to write for/about games?” or “Why should I hire you to write for/about games?”
You’ve probably guessed it already. It’s been on this very page before, much to my chagrin. I’ve even uttered it in person, likely after an unflattering “uhh, well…” The single most common answer seems to be a variation on this phrase:
“I love video games. I’ve been playing them my whole life. And I think writing is pretty groovy, too.”
And I do love video games. I have been playing them for as long as I can remember. I also happen to think writing is the bee’s knees. But that really doesn’t tell you who I am and it certainly doesn’t set me apart from the faceless mass of gamers who like to write, or even writers who like to game.
So what makes me unique? Why would you want to read anything I have to say, let alone pay me to say it?
I’m a female gamer, but that’s not exactly unique. There are tons of kick ass ladies working professionally in this industry. I’m bisexual, but that also doesn’t make me all that unique. There are so many people who have gone through so much more than I have and can relate that life experience to their writing and the games they play.
What I can tell you is that as of February 2012 I am 26, living in Gainesville, Florida and involved in a longterm relationship. I lost my 17 year-old cat in October. I lost my grandfather in 2001. I don’t hold grudges, but there’s a few choice people on my shit list. I cry at the stupidest things. I have a pretty good relationship with my mom, but I haven’t talked to my dad since I was 8. I don’t really care for lima beans. I believe in honesty and integrity, and the worst possible thing you can do to me is say one thing to my face and then another behind my back. Or hurt my friends in any way, shape, or form. I once drove my plastic-cased Saturn 9 hours to Knoxville, Tennessee. My latest guilty pleasure is Storage Wars. I’m legally blind in one eye. I’ve been in the hospital for major surgery 11 times in my life, 10 of those occurring between the ages of 9-13.
Before I just rattle off an even longer list of seemingly unrelated things, let me stop there. Because I think that’s really where this story begins. Or where it should begin, were it written in narrative form. Because yes, I started playing games as soon as my hands could hold onto a controller. But games didn’t become a true staple in my life until they were just about one of the only things I could actually do.
In 1996 my mom took me to have my eyes checked out because I’d been seeing black spots. The next day I was two hours away from home waking up from anesthesia with a metal eyepatch taped to my face. My retina had, in layman’s terms, just randomly decided to rip apart. So they fixed it. Then fixed it again a few months later. And again. They fixed it a total of 6 times, only to realize 2 years later that it just wasn’t fixable.
For the majority of those 2 years I was instructed to keep my head parallel to the ground as much as humanly possible. Being 9 years old, I fucking hated this idea. I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t play with my cat. I couldn’t even eat a bowl of mac and cheese without facing straight down at it.
I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ because my mom was working and going to school. So in effort to alleviate some of my frustration, my grandpa set up a little TV at the foot of my bed and hooked it up to my Playstation. And I played the heck out of that console. With my head hanging over the bed, parallel to the floor.
When I wasn’t playing games (or admittedly watching reruns of Wings on USA) I had a little bed tray that I used almost exclusively for writing. Pages and pages of blue ink on loose leaf, wide-rule paper. I wrote about the experience of my surgery. I wrote about possessed dog collars and ‘roid raging quarterbacks and a bunch of other weird shit I probably had no business writing about. But I also wrote about the games I was playing; continuing their stories or creating stories where none existed before.
Now I play my console games sitting on top of a bouncy exercise ball, less than 5 feet from the TV. You know, like a normal person. And I write by staring at a blinking cursor for a few hours inbetween obsessively checking Facebook, Cracked, That Guy With The Glasses and a myriad of other pointless websites until I berate myself into getting something onto the page.
This is me. If you like what I have to say, awesome. Stick around and we’ll make a good run of it.
