The Life and Times of the WoS

This week's shared topic over at Blog Azeroth is all about our own autoblogographies. It's main focus is on how we began our journeys as WoW bloggers, why do we do what we do, the challenges we may face, so on and so forth. While my blogging journey thus far been rather short, I do have a story to tell - however minor it may really be.

What started it all.
Once upon a time, in a land far far away from Azeroth, there lived a girl in the great white north (aka Michigan). She grew up doing the normal things that most kids in America do: go to school, hang out with friends, write numerous amounts of papers on mundane topics to keep her English teachers off her back...you know, kid/young adult stuff. Now, this girl wasn't particular fond of writing, but from a very young age she had a certain knack for it. Often her mother, who during the girl's middle school/high school days had returned to college, would come to this girl to proof read her papers, which almost always resulted in an A paper for the mother with perhaps only a single mistake marked up. At school though the girl was bored of the topics given to her, and often refused to do more work than what was necessary to pass her classes.

College soon began for that girl, and again the English courses often failed to inspire her. Even the creative writing courses failed to spark her imagination. The topics of "What has been the most emotionally significant moment in your life?" and "What was the most pivotal experience that has changed your life?" or "What is your biggest, baddest life secret?" all just seemed to personal to actually write about, plus being at a young age she didn't really feel that there had been a significant number of life altering situations in which she could share with that limited audience of the teacher. Again, she resorted to doing the minimal amount of work needed to pass, only throwing her heart into the one or two non mind-numbing topics that came her way.

Throughout her high school and college career she kept a DeadJournal account, and later a LiveJournal account as well. This wasn't really the place where creativity took place, but it simply allowed for an outlet. It also kept her writing without her even knowing it. It forced her away from the L33T SP34K and short hand crap that most of her friends who only used AIM had been infected with, and it allowed her to reflect back on times that she may have otherwise had forgotten. While it may have been mostly a place to QQ to the world about what was going on in her life, it was also a place that kept a hidden talent somewhat nurtured.

Soon the girl began to play WoW. She helped form guilds and filled their forums with content. She found that even though she was fairly quiet in real life, she had a voice in the land of all things digital. She had the gift of digital gab. Whether or not she was able to hold folks' attention spans for very long remained a mystery to her, but she didn't care. She just kept typing.

The girl's real life soon shifted, and the guilds with their forums soon disappeared. Where was she to turn? She longed to chat about WoW things, but had no platform in which she could speak from. No crowd in which she could speak to. The old LiveJournal account was fairly dead, but even if it wasn't, there was no going back to that, for it did not contain her WoW life, but simply was the remainder of an old life long since gone.

One night the girl had been speaking to a WoW friend, and he had somehow brought up the idea of how someone had once blogged about leveling their character. This was the spark. While the original idea was to do something similar, but with an actual story line twist to it (role-play writing, something the girl had never really done). While she loved this idea, she felt that she would need another blog in order to keep her readers updated on her various projects.

That secondary blog, my dear friends, is what you're reading today.


The Challenges, They Come as They See Fit.
While the original intent of my blogging was to actually get into story writing, I've found myself shifting. I've come to find that I more prefer an article type style of writing over story writing simply because I have a very short memory. Yes, I am one of those types who needs to write things down to remember them, only to forget where I put the piece of paper that had the list of the things I needed to remember on it.

It's been a few years since I've been out of school, and this in itself has presented a bit of a problem: I'm rusty. All the writing in this blog that I've done in the past few weeks has left me feeling much like I would have felt after a week's worth of exams back in college. My mind seems to be more or less an unused muscle in the creative sense. Sure, I used to write heartfelt posts, posts on what you should be gemming/enchanting/speccing as for x class, and various other non-sense for the guild, but I haven't actually written anything in years.

For those of you that don't know (for there are still multitudes that do not), I'm also in real life a very nervous person. This hasn't always been the case, but it has been a major issue for some time now. In the past few weeks, while it's been challenging trying to get myself back up to what I deem as my writing standards, it's also been incredibly therapeutic for me. I've been less twitchy - as I so like to term it. It's been a major positive influence in my life, even in the few short months that this blog has been in existence. Even so though, trying to get this blog up and running, attempting to dive into the WoW blog community, and trying to get myself into free-lance writing in real life has been...well, scary.

While I may have a list of challenges that I face from day to day with both real life and this blog, I plan to face these challenges and laugh at them; defeat them. All because I have a place to spill out my craniumorial (yes, I love to make up words) contents into, I have begun to make that change that all of us needs at one point or another in our lives.


To Each Action There is Always an Equal and Opposite Reaction
Game wise, this blog has also caused me to think slightly different. No longer do I simply worry about the best way to gem or whether or not I should be standing in fire...granted this is also in part due to my lack of ability to raid these days...details. No, now I also find myself looking through my bank, wondering which new Hoarders: Azeroth Edition I should do up next. I've also been thinking more about gear sets, and how I can best apply them into The Rack. My questing has taken on a slightly different form as well, because now I often find myself taking screen shots of quests I particularly enjoyed, but don't have time to read. Simply, blogging about WoW has shifted my thought process a bit, and this isn't a bad thing in my eyes.


Here's to What Was, and to the Future.
At the end of the day, my blogging journey is really about me and my desire to remember. I honestly wish I had started a WoW-based blog back when I first began playing. Sadly I had no idea how obsessed I would be with the game three and a half years later, nor did I realize how much I would have forgotten in that time span. I want that option of being able to look back a year or two from now to see what I was up to. I want to remember what kind of silly antics I was up to, which things I was obsessively trying to collect, what I was thinking. Sure, at first I simply wanted to unbottle the babble that was stuck in my head, but ultimately, it's all about the memories.

I'm such a sucker for the past : P