#RPGaDay2021 - Day 18 - Write Everyday!

Day 18 of #RPGaDay2021 is already here and my target for today is "WRITE." 

It's the old adage to basic writing advice, "Write Everyday!"

As a guy in his late 40's, who has seen this massive swing of consumer electronics technology, one of my regrets is that I couldn't properly use a blog when I was younger. 

Sure, blogs are usually someone's singular focus, photography, gardening, fashion, books, you name it, there's a blog about it (and more than a few trying to monetize it, with varied success).  Most of the time these blogs refine their focus even more (sunsets, self-sustaining gardens, cottagecore, mystery novels).

I'll be honest, the initial concept of Gaming with the Gnomies followed that limited approach, just to cover the Gnome Wars game by Jim Stanton.  If I had kept that approach, I would have had 507 posts over the last 12 years.  

Instead, I have 3,746.  Why the difference?

Because by my third post on the blog, I diverted from wargaming with Gnomes to a post about my Call of Cthulhu actual plays.   Then I veered off onto cool non-gnome minis, mouslings, Risus, and a host of other different (gaming-related) topics.  

I've realized over the years that, for me, a blog is something I've always wanted.  Not the laser focus topic repository, rather a place to collect my thoughts and ideas, to tell people of all the cool stuff I found, and a much better place to steal/hide everyone else's ideas (after RPGaDay is done, I'll still have over 300 draft posts full of wargaming scenarios, paints schemes, and role-playing ideas that I'd like to do "someday."  The blog has become a source for all my hopes and dreams, all my current success, and a bastion of nostalgia.  I only wish I had started sooner, to properly record my high school D&D games (although The Lost Dispatches of Feraso is a good effort at recollecting them almost thirty years later).  I'd have an embarrassing record of all the years I played Magic, specific details of the local cons, instead of a blurred image.  Heck I'd even admit to the Skaven army I so wanted to buy but couldn't afford in the early 90's.   

But how did the Gnome Wars deviate so much?   Realizing one blog could (and should) handle everything, and by writing more and more each week.  On the first anniversary of my first post, I had 63 posts under my belt.  I've developed processes over the years to showcase different things I enjoy. Tuesdays are for actual plays, currently my Star Wars d6 campaign.  Fridays are what I painted for the week.  Around the end of the month I post my "cool picks" in Another Month of Gaming mentioning some of the cool new solicitation from Game Trade Magazine (Alliance Game Distribution).  And yes, I do mention and link a good number of Kickstarters that I either love, think are cool, or cast some derision on for how poorly thought out or organized they are. Throw in an entire month where I write something based on someone else's idea for topics, and everything else that tickles my fancy, and year-over-year I average better than a post a day.  

Regardless of whether I write up something on my lunchbreak at work, a late night painting session completing figs, or even just a few lines on one (or more) future posts, I find writing for the blog therapeutic and awakening.