Setting Sail

Sunrise

There's something oddly magical about starting a day in the twilight of pre-dawn. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly miserable and you just know you'll be exhausted by the time the day ends, but every now and again, it's worth it to be present when the sun rises -- for all the problems in the world, it is a nice reminder of how small we (and they) truly are. It helps to put things in perspective to realize that we are nothing more than small specks of cosmic dust, in the form of hairless apes running around on the surface of a slightly bigger speck of dust that's circling around a burning ball of gas.

I don't know about you, but looking through that frame always makes my problems seem silly.

Anyway, enough musing on cosmic (in)significance.

I'm marking today as the start of something. As long as I can remember, I have enjoyed the written word. I started reading at a young age -- and am ever-thankful to my parents for encouraging it. I'm sure they weren't the first, but I have fond memories of scholastic classics such as The Berenstain Bears and The Magic School Bus. Naturally, the Scholastic Book Fair was the event of the season for little me.

As I got older, the books I read changed, and I slowly learned more and more about what I enjoyed in fiction, as well as writing styles. I tried my hand several times at writing myself, although I don't recall the specifics of those early attempts.

It's all about the story

You see, the one thing I realized about myself from the get-go was that I loved stories. I loved reading them, I loved telling them, I loved thinking about them. Even as I 'grew up', this remained true. Towards the end of high school, and on into university, I'd mostly swapped the book for a game controller -- but inevitably it seems, I always preferred games that were much bigger on narrative than shiny graphics.

I had slowly fallen out of the habit of reading (books) sometime into my post-schooling. Then, sometime around 2018, I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by a good friend of mine, while doing freelance commentary out in China. This being D&D's Fifth Edition and well into the 'Actual Play' craze popularized by shows like Critical Role and Dimension20, I saw the narrative elements of the game in action from the start of our very first session in that Shanghai apartment.

Playing for the few months before my contract was up stirred something in me. A seed, planted long ago and neglected in recent years, soaked in some much-needed nourishment. Over the next few years, it would slowly blossom, as I spent time, first in the early stages of the Covid pandemic, then broadly, reading and reigniting my passion for stories. I began what would develop into a four year D&D campaign with friends across the country. I dove headlong into mythology and folklore, jumpstarted by obsessive (and frequently wine-fueled) Hades runs. And I read, and read, and read.

The bottom falls out

While I spent a lot of effort developing skills in web development (this blog is built with some really awesome, open-source tools -- more on that in another post), programming, and generally re-learning a lot of tech over the last few years, I still wasn't all that happy. Developing and designing websites and apps was engaging, to an extent, but I had put in the effort mainly to find gainful employment. And well, as it turns out (at least for the last 2-ish years), the job market for that kind of work reallllly sucks.

Well, fuck.

I had to stop running, and take a look back to realize that I had been going in circles. Two years, a mountain of learning, hundreds (probably) of job applications, and not a single job offer. To be honest, it still hurts to write that out -- like it's somehow a reflection of my value, my self-worth that I haven't been able to get hired, instead of a perfect storm of layoffs, abundance of new developers and bootcamp grads, and companies offshoring work, or trying to outsource it to whatever shiny new AI tool they got sold on.

And I'm not saying I won't still be looking, but I am finished with exclusively chasing a job that, for the time being, seems harder and harder to get. It took me a long time (and a lot of people who care about me drumming it into my head) to realize that maybe I'm not doing what I should be doing. Perhaps the 'safe' or 'smart' choice wasn't much of either anyway. So what then? What should I be doing? What am I passionate about? I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Set sail, pen to paper

So...yeah. I'm a writer -- and I suppose I always have been, if I'm honest. And with all that out of the way...

Welcome to my blog, Re: Missives! Much like myself, it is very much a work in progress, but we all need to start somewhere, right? Here's where I'll be putting down thoughts, detailing things I'm working on and at, and perhaps providing some useful information to anyone who stumbles upon it. Regardless of where, or when, you're reading this, I hope you find it useful, entertaining, or preferrably, a bit of both.

Cheers, Devin

(Cover image credit to Matt Vince)