The Escapist, and why this blog exists.

For a good long time, I've been visiting a website called The Escapist. I first went for the fast-talking, swearing game reviewer known as Yahtzee, and for the longest time he was the only reason I ever considered going there. I got well-acquainted, during that time, with a few of the forum members, as I occasionally would find an interesting thread and give it a read. After a while, I began idling in their IRC, sometimes reading what people had to say.

The community really impressed me at the time. They had an air of closeness despite the forum being quite larger than any other I'd visited. Good-sized walls of text were all over the place, all on interesting topics, and I couldn't help but wonder why they apologized for writing so much. It was, and still is, quite the impressive place.

These days I don't browse the forums themselves much, but I do still idle and chat in the IRC, whose community is close-knit, even moreso than that of the forums themselves, and I seem to have become a tightly-woven fixture in this community as well.

I realized, however, fairly recently, being around three months ago, that The Escapist's weekly "magazine" was actually made up of Freelance articles written by various extremely skilled writers. I wanted in on that, so I wrote my first pitch, just dying to hear back and get some feedback.

Of course, I wasn't accepted to write an article from my pitch, but I got something nearly as good, in my mind: one of my favorite writers from The Escapist, Susan Arendt, replied back saying that, while I wasn't accepted as one of the article writers, she liked my perspective.

Here I was, and here I still am, this amateur without a published article or a real hope at a job writing in the world, being told by a professional that I had a good perspective.

I was impressed with myself. Honestly, I think that is what eventually got me up to the point I am now, and what caused me to resurrect this dead blog. I haven't submitted a pitch to The Escapist in a while, but I spent today writing several ideas out, and I can't wait to get more feedback--Or, hell, maybe I can even get myself published. Who needs money when you can have recognition, right?

I'd rather write and make nothing than do anything else for hundreds of dollars, and it's really The Escapist that is there to thank for that. So I must thank the community, some of which is undoubtedly reading this, and I must thank Susan, as she was really the driving force behind my continued trial-and-error writing.