Originally published on Trevor Trove on August 26, 2016
300 Days.
That seems important, right? What with the zeroes and all.
If you’re new (or just don’t know the story), I launched this site nearly a year ago on August 29, 2015 with an entry titled “How PlayStation Experience Changed My Life.” Posts for the next couple of months were sparse and inconsistent. I only wrote eleven posts total in the months of August, September, and October.
Then, on November 1st, I started challenging myself to write every day. Inspired by my friend Alex O’Neill (who is up over 500 days himself), I set out on a “Don’t Break the Chain” mission to force myself to write every day. But I took it one step further than Alex by insisting I publish what I wrote each day.* Today marks the 300th day.
* Thanks to some shoddy internet connections, I have missed a publish date here and there. But in each instance I was still writing and on the following day published two articles to make up for the missed day so I count the chain unbroken.
Ever the data analyst, I have been crunching some numbers:
- Over 304 posts (E3 had a few multi-post days), I have written nearly 240,000 words on gaming.
- I have review 50 games in the last 300 days (includes six “(Not a) Reviews”).
- Articles have averaged 787 words each.
- Writing focused on events (PlayStation Experience, PAX, Kinda Funny Live, E3, etc.) had comprised more than 25% of the words written.
- I’ve written roughly 8,000 words on two separate games: Fallout 4 (with my “Scouting the Commonwealth” series) and Stardew Valley (with my “Starkey Valley”series).
- The Kinda Funny Live 2 Saturday night recap has been my most read entry by a mile, with nearly 4,000 people visiting the site the day after it posted.
- For context, my daily average is less than 50 people.
- Any post Greg Miller retweets (like the KFL2 one) ends up with a huge boost for me, for which I am eternally grateful.
So where am I going from here?
A big focus this year has been getting out to events and networking with people in the industry. I have been incredibly blessed with some of the connections I’ve made but one of the things I’m continually running up against is that the industry is on a one-way trip away from written articles. They’ll always still cling to life against the flood of video and audio content, but just barely.
So I’m reforging the chain.
Instead of forcing myself to write a published piece of content each day, I’m going to steer this site into more video and audio content. I will absolutely still write. Most likely still every day, even. But I’m going to give myself time to breathe and, more importantly, edit. As I’ve spent a good chunk of this week collecting all of my previous articles together, the number of mistakes I’ve seen – just in passing – have had me cringing non-stop. By allowing myself to actually review and edit the content, instead of often just spitting out the first draft once I finished, my hope is to provide better writing all around.
As for the video and audio components, I’m still trying to work out some of the details but I’ve gone ahead and invested in Adobe Premiere so I’ll be looking to teach myself video editing. With any luck, this will lead to regular Vlogs, Let’s Plays, and Video Reviews. These will be posted here to the site via my YouTube channel. I’m also hoping to establish a plan for some sort of regular streaming schedule. Feel free to follow me on Twitch to receive notifications on that front.
Likely the most immediate new bit of programming will be the long-in-gestation podcast: Trove Talk. I humbled by the number of people who have reached out and asked about when I’m doing a podcast (and incredibly grateful for all of the people who have invited me onto their shows). I hope to start delivering on that in the coming weeks. Follow @TroveTalk on Twitter to keep up to date on that endeavor.
I’ll also be branching out to some of my other interests, most prominently Movies and Television. The original blogspot version of Trevor Trove was a mix of gaming and theatre content. Theatre tends to be way to locally-focused to appeal to the broader audience I’ve picked up though so it likely won’t take center stage (HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!) like it did back when I was writing for a primarily Phoenix-based audience. But I definitely want to start using this outlet to engage in a conversation outside of “just” gaming.
The goal will still be to publish something to the site daily. But if I’m being brutally honest, spending a few hours writing an article might not be as beneficial to my future in the industry as instead recording a quick 10-minute reaction video saying roughly the same thing and spending the other 2 hours and 50 minutes teaching myself to edit it.
This whole endeavor is definitely a passion project for me until it becomes a real job in the industry. And damn is it expensive with all the travel and buying games. But I’m blessed with a full-time job that affords me these opportunities on the side so I’m not ready to walk away from that for the unknown quantity of freelance work. I seriously considered unveiling a Patreon campaign to go along with these other announcements but I don’t think I’m there yet (especially if I can’t even give specifics on the announcements I’m making). Maybe someday but I’m not there yet. In the meantime, I’ll still have my 16-bit Trevor pins at events like PAX and PlayStation Experience for $5 each.
Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope the future of this site is even a fraction as exciting for you as it is for me.