I'm Back

After about two years of not writing at all I suddenly find myself getting paid to write about videogames.

So I’ve been playing games basically as long as I can remember and since I developed even the most basic critical thinking skills I’ve been studying games and the games industry without really knowing I was doing it. Because of this I, naturally, gravitated towards writing about games and even managed to get published on a couple of sites. In both of those cases the sites either changed their content strategy so they no longer required my services or went on hiatus. I tried to stay positive and keep working at my day job and put myself out there as a writer.

That didn’t really work out.

The closest I came to a writing gig was an offer to write synopses of other writers’ reviews for a startup reviews aggregation site. Basically, I was being asked to write mini review blurbs based only off reading other people’s work and not playing the game in question. To me this felt too close to plagiarism for comfort so I didn’t take the job. This was after months and months of applying to websites with no reply at all.

That’s when I got a job at Amazon and quit writing.

I’m aware that Amazon has a poor reputation about treatment of workers. But for me, it was pretty nice. Maybe that’s because I’d been working in retail where managers felt comfortable making misogynistic to my coworkers and HR would just laugh it off. Or where I’d try to advocate for a raise for the team I was leading because we’d clearly increased profits for a department and my bosses would look at me like I’d grown a second head because my team didn’t have the word ‘sales’ in our title. I’m not saying that everyone at Amazon has it great and that they don’t need Unions. I’m saying that industry wide organization would probably help a lot more people who have it worse.

Then I got promoted out of warehouse work.

It turns out paying off your credit cards does wonders for relieving anxiety and building confidence.

Next I went to E3

I still feel privileged to attend the show every year and this year I decided to take things easy at E3. Instead of waiting in anxiety inducing lines all day and desperately rushing around the show floor, this year I decided to chill out in the panels in the arena and just wander around. It was great and it really lit a fire in me to be a part of the gaming industry event if I was just, in the famous words of one Industry executive “a press, sneak, fuck”.

So I applied for a bunch of news writing jobs.

And to my surprise, I was offered two freelance jobs within days of each other. I’m still technically on probation at both sites but I’m getting published at The Nerd Stash and The Gamer. They’re even paying me for my labor like it’s worth something.