So, yeah.

If you hadn’t noticed (and honestly, why would you have? I hadn’t mentioned this on any of my socials or on stream), I did not write a word throughout the summer. I think a lot of that had to do with where my brain was in enforcing where this blog/webpage/thing ended up going, and where I actually wanted it to go. See, I spent over two years writing about solely MTG stuff for Cardsphere. It was my first real/real writing gig in the subject and I really enjoyed the time spent there and the opportunities I had to get my thoughts in front of eyeballs. I’ve loved writing since I was old enough to do it, and not that many people get the opportunity to write and get paid for it.

I took the end of that gig very hard even though I rationally understood it. Things end for a lot of different reasons, and rationally I knew a lot of them to be true in this case. I had also been kicking around the idea of writing for myself rather than writing for others for a while. I’ve always bet on me and my abilities to move things forward in my life, so I had hoped to continue what I was doing on my own terms and on my own schedule. In fact, I had found the writing schedule that I was trying to keep up to be harder than I’d thought. After all, I was writing about Standard in maybe the worst two-year period of the format in the game’s history. I was attempting to make chicken feed out of chicken sh*t, and there were some weeks where I was putting off the article until the very last minute as I combed any patch of information I could find to find something interesting to say about a format that had ceased to be interesting months before. Subconsciously, I figured that I could just keep doing that here and everything would be all right.

But it turns out that one of the things that I wrote here changed my mind, whether I realized it or not.

My article about a song, Songs that Break Me (Ch. 1), was life-changing in a way. It got a tiny bit of attention outside of the usual circles, and I was really honored and surprised at the reaction. I honestly thought that a lot of people would hate it or be angry with me because I had dared to write something outside of my lane. But I really enjoyed it because I had carried those ideas around in my head with me for a long time and finally mustered up either the courage or the ganas to vomit them onto the page just because I thought they were important. And it also encouraged me to think about other topics outside of the world of my favorite collectable card game in the universe. Yes, I wrote a couple of other articles about MTG topics shortly after that one. But they didn’t move me the way the former did. And so I avoided writing for a while because I thought there was something wrong with what I thought about my writing or something wrong with the article itself. But I finally realized through introspection and weekly therapy (which I’ve been doing for years and highly recommend BTW) that what my brain tells me ain’t necessarily so. And that’s true not only in “real life” but also in writing.

So, long story short, what I’m trying to say is that I’m going to resume writing in this space starting today. Yes, I’m still going to write about Magic. I couldn’t NOT write about MTG, to be honest. It is still what I spend the majority of my time streaming and playing (although Genshin is quickly taking second place but that’s another story) and so I always have ideas and opinions about decklists, current developments in the game, and the meta. But I’ve also realized that “the meta” is what I’m most happy writing about. The meta is the game above the game. In fact (and I’m not sure I’ve ever told this story before), my streaming name of FDTerritory was short for Five Down Territory, which was my first idea for writing. I’m a big sports fan, and so I thought I’d write about the meta of sports…in American football you get four downs and people talk about “four down territory” being one of the most crucial points of the game, my clever ass thought that naming a blog “Five Down Territory” that wrote about the things outside of and above the game would be interesting. The idea lasted a lot longer than the actual product, and that’s okay. But I’m going to keep chasing the meta in a lot of different areas. I’d like to continue writing about music from time to time, and I might even touch on some other areas that interest me such as sports, productivity, and whatever else I happen to read that makes me want to put something into the aether that I’d prefer to last longer than the hellscape that is Twitter. If I write about a topic or an area that doesn’t interest you, I hope you grant me the grace to pat me on the head and go on with your life. I promise I’ll get back to your metier eventually. Either way, I’m more than grateful to every one of you who consumes my content, whether it’s here or on stream or however you happened to find me. Content creators do what they do for the content, but they also do it in the hopes that their content changes someone else. If you made it this far, you’re who I’m talking about and I will be eternally grateful for your eyes and time.

So let’s do this. It’s fifth down. Ready?