So hi. Remember me? Remember this place?

I do of course understand how weird it is that my last blog post described how I was going to be revamping the blog to cover more than MTG decklists and tend towards more of a general writing/update sort of thing…and then I promptly went silent for more than four months. I did not anticipate, however, the huge shifts in my life in general and in streaming in particular that were going to happen over the summer. So I’m going to drop a really quick update on all of the above, and then try to get back to covering things here. 

First thing: my job situation. For a few years now, MTG has been my primary working role in my life. Streaming and writing not only kept me busy, it was my main way of being able to create in between trips taking Li’l FDT to school twice a day. In the middle of the summer, however, that changed significantly. My long-time gym home pulled me aside and asked me if I’d become a substitute coach for them and they’d assist me in getting the necessary certifications. I agreed, and I spent a couple of months studying for exams and learning the ins and outs of Crossfit coaching. Shortly after becoming a coach, another coach at the gym announced her departure, and I’ve stepped into the role of a more permanent member of the staff. I absolutely love the work, and it’s really interesting and allows me to help other people get more comfortable with exercise and being in a gym. (I’ve also been able to sneak in a bunch of nerb/weeb stuff to the unsuspecting masses, but I’m sure that’ll be a future post). But that transition has taken me away from being as involved in the MTG meta as I have in the past. I still play, of course, but in a much more casual sort of way. I play very little ranked (just because I’m playing to chill out and not to reach a certain level on the ladder), and I’ve simultaneously played less as the dominance of black or black/red decks in Standard didn’t motivate me to try to innovate. So I’ve fallen behind. It happens. 

Second, I haven’t stopped writing per se…I’ve just been writing somewhere else. If you’ve been on stream, you know about my current interest in playing Genshin Impact. I don’t play it on stream as often as I could, but it gets a fair amount of my gaming time. While playing, however, I did something I’d never done before: I started thinking about the lore. Specifically, I started thinking about the holes in the lore and how I’d fill them if I had gotten the chance to write my own.

And so, I wrote my own.

In the past couple of months, I’ve written two separate short stories that I’ve posted on Archive Of Our Own, which is a website dedicated to (sigh) fanfiction. I hate the term “fanfiction”. I can’t really think about it without thinking of adult websites and “smut”, and I’m pretty sure that I’m never going to be the sort of person who writes that. But I’ve come to accept that what I write is, indeed, fanfiction. I received a lot of support and encouragement from other fiction writers, and I’ve honestly come to enjoy the process and catharsis of getting these stories out of my head and sharing them with other people. I’ve never, ever, EVER been a fiction writer outside of whatever I was forced to write in organized education. However, it’s been very…freeing, I guess is the word, to experience what it’s like to create a narrative and share it with the world. Fiction also carries with it a sort of discovery that nonfiction doesn’t…when you’re writing to communicate information or to make a point about something, the structure of the argument usually prevents the element of surprise. But when I’m writing fiction, I fill in details and events that I hadn’t really considered in my head but make complete sense at the instant my fingers move on the keyboard. It’s a neat experience, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot.

So, in order to facilitate all of this studying and writing I’ve been doing, a lot of my streams have transitioned to coworking streams. In case you haven’t found your way to this small yet awesome corner of the Twitch community, coworking streams involve doing pomodoros (a system where you work for a certain amount of time, take a short break, then repeat) of work on camera. I have streams on Mondays and Wednesdays where I work for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, and repeat. In these work sessions, I invite other people around the world to grab their work or study materials and join me. During breaks, we encourage each other and talk about what we’re working on. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have found coworking…it is the most encouraging, most productive part of Twitch I could imagine. The random e-boys screaming profanities at COD are not hanging out in coworking streams. These are usually very productive adults, either studying for upper-level courses or writers and content creators trying to produce good stuff, and they’re wonderful at focusing your energy on your own work and encouraging you to get after it. In other words, these are my people. So I couldn’t help but get involved. I love the idea that I can help others produce good things just by being here…that, no matter how many viewers I have, those X number of viewers will have done more than they would have done otherwise. As mentioned previously in these spaces, I am at heart an IRL support main. I like helping others succeed. So coaching and coworking go hand-in-hand to fill that role.

You are now up-to-date on me and the blog. Now: let’s get back to writing interesting stuff.