A bit about the blog-ish stuff…

“It’s been a long road, 

getting from there to here…”

— Rod Steward, “Faith of the Heart”

Yes, I actually feel the need to say a couple of words as a preface to my “blog”. I use blog in quotes for a reason – this thing dates back to December, 2000, and at the time I’m writing this preface it weighs in at half a million words, not including the novels also posted on here.

Half a million words in 12 years. Yes, I have an addiction to writing, and have had for quite some time. It wasn’t until 2009 that I started writing my first book (which, incidentally, started as a blogging project. And was horribly written.)

Not all of this was originally on MidnightRyder.org. It’s came from a variety of blogging sources over the years. Originally it was stuff related to video game development – with a small bit about my personal life – on my company site, MidnightRyder.com. Then LiveJournal came about, then MySpace, then back to MidnightRyder.com, then Xanga, then MidnightRyder.org, then Multiply, and finally little bit of Facebook. I had a hard time finding (and sticking with) a place I was comfortable dealing with. It’s not that I had a problem with people seeing what I was writing (though I was often fascinated with the idea that anyone read my drivel), even if it caused me some social discomfort a time to two.

It boiled down the the places themselves. Often I didn’t like the tools available, or I felt they weren’t dependable enough – nothing more aggravating than loosing a post after you write for 15 minutes, for instance. They weren’t in my control, either, which meant at any time they made a change to, well, anything, I had to put up with it. And, of course, there’s the final thing: I was creating content for them to make money on, rather than furthering my own goals.

It took a while, but I went back and recovered everything I could from the past. Some of it was sort of lost – MidnightRyder.com has gone through so many revisions, and I wasn’t concerned with retaining the data back then. Fortunately, I managed to pick up a little bit of it using the Internet Wayback Machine. Then some of it was really, really lost – MidnightRyder.com it’s self dates back to before December 14th, 2000, which is the first post that appears on here. MidnightRyder.com was registered in November, 1999, and I posted a few entries around the end of the year, so around a year’s worth of entries were lost.

Then, I brought it all here, under one roof, and sometimes I even managed to get it to preserve part of the comments from the original posts. It was a bit of work, but now I’ve got nearly everything I’ve written of a blog-ish nature here.  Some of it is personal, some of it is business, and some of it is video game development related.  And, in my opinion, 90% of it is somewhat uninteresting drivel 🙂

And, just for the heck of it, there’s a neat “timeline” feature that allows you to kinda see the highlights.  Kinda cool.

Now, you might think with the amount I’ve written online in the last 12 years or so, you’d know everything there is to know about me.  Not really.  There’s a lot I don’t talk about in all the various blogs I wrote, and there’s a good number of years of fun stuff that happened way before I started blogging.  Wow – yes, there really is a life before blogs 😉  So, before you think you know it all about me, take a step back and realize this is the “highlights” of my life.  The good, the bad, the overoptimistic, and the downright foolish.  My life is weird, and always has been.  My gauge for normal has long since been broken – for me, things have to be pretty out the before I think it’s abnormal.

Some parts of my life that didn’t make it into my blogs ended up becoming books.  The Story of Gamer Zone is a very autobiographical work about business (in fact, somehow, somewhere, someone added that book as an autobiography on my IMDB entry.  Yep, I have an IMDB entry for one short movie, but I can’t get my TV credit on there!)  Muse contains bits and pieces of my life wrapped up as a fantasy.  The Incredible Dave has a weird “alternate history” version of my life as it’s backdrop.  And there’s more stuff in other books that involves the stuff that never got wrote down, though good luck sorting out what is real and what’s completely made up 😉

So, you’re welcome to read it all.  Half a million words.  You could start at the beginning if you wanted, and read through it all.  To put it in perspective – a typical manuscript page for a book is 250 words. That means my blog stuff is roughly 2,000 manuscript pages long (printed pages are much more variable, depending on large print or normal, book format, etc.)  If figure if you really want to read it, you’re going to be a while! 🙂

You might notice one thing:  it’s been a while since I’ve written anything new for the blog.  Most of my writing energy ends up directed towards the books, and when I do try and write on the blog it ends up being a partially completely entry that gets stuffed into my drafts folder, never to be seen again.  But, one of these days, I’ll get back to it… 😉

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr