A Fresh Start

A few of you might have been regular visitors of my old blog called Dreadblade. I'm not shutting it down or deleting it, but I haven't written a post in a really long time. I'm not going to go through the many reasons why, but I can summarize it quickly by saying I felt I lost my voice there. I had thousands of thoughts, opinions, and advice on various gaming topics - ideas were not the problem. The problem was that I was evolving as a gamer, and I struggled to help my blog evolve with it.

This year my daughters Madeline and Jocelyn turned six and four respectively. They are amazing and brilliant, as well as obnoxious and astonishingly dumb. So goes the dichotomy of parenting. As they grow up I find myself having less and less time to game and write, which is surprising to me. They are less dependent on me for sure, but they are engaged in activities and dates with friends and other such appointments that I'm rather busy. Most evenings I pass out on the couch around 9 pm, which basically puts a dagger in the gaming habits of my past.

Notice how the one on the right has a little 'pose' going on? She is always like that. Camera comes out and she starts shifting her hips, sticking out her foot - the whole deal. It's like living with Zoolander.

I really needed a fresh start, and I decided to create a new site rather than overhauling the old one. When I'm back into the groove of writing I may even post there again, who knows. But this feels right for now. In March I lost my coaching job, and I was pretty devastated. I had poured a lot of emotion, energy, and money into that job and felt betrayed when they let me go after changing Athletic Directors (a common practice in college, but not in high school). I've been struggling with how to help the family finances since then, with no job opportunities in coaching and a saturated job market in teaching. To make matters worse (better?) my wife, a pediatrician, makes more money in a year of moonlighting than the starting salary of any job I could pick up, and we'd be spending almost my whole salary on daycare anyway. So I'm throwing myself into being a stay-at-home dad, and writing my blogs. I may even monetize the site at some point, if I feel I'm consistently producing good content, in an effort to help the family budget.

Interruptions are a regular occurrence on an hourly basis with kids. In fact, this post has been interrupted 4 5 6 times already. The focus of my blog will be to discuss topics related to gaming while parenting. How my kids are picking up my gaming habits, how I choose games to play based on knowing I'll be interrupted, and other topics of a similar nature. Since I do all the cooking at home - and am pretty good at it - I may even do some posts about meals and recipes. I plan to regularly review games (old and new) based on their appeal to parents. I hope to stream those games on Twitch as part of the review and post the recordings on YouTube. With the help of my brilliant, gorgeous, and non-gaming wife I even aspire to have social gaming sessions with others, maybe even on stream.   

Its a pretty ambitious undertaking to be honest, but having a plan makes me more optimistic about creating the content that I want to create.

Thanks for reading this far and I hope to see you back here again.