30 Day Challenge Day Twenty Three: Something you love about the geek community?

If you’re interested in participating in the Geek Out Challenge, read this post here! Each day I will be posting a question for that day for the next 30 days. Follow along each day with your own post or feel free to wait until the entire challenge has been released and take it on when you like! Be sure to link back to the master post at the end or link back to each post for each day.

Day Twenty Three: Something you love about the geek community?

“Feeling’s aren’t positive and negative. They simply exist. It’s what we do with those feelings that becomes good or bad”

Marina Sirtis, Star Trek: The Next Generation “Descent Part One”

Positivity, by its very definition the presence of desirable attributes we seek to obtain for ourselves and for the wellbeing of those around us. When I begun this writing project in July 2018, I was apprehensive of the response and those I would engage with, certainly an ambition outside my ordinary comfort zone and field of expertise. We are all creators shaping and curating our own content in our own voices, rushing out and staking a small corner of the digital continent similar to the pioneers in the American land rush of 1889. Moving into the public unknown can be a daunting prospect, your content immortalised for prosperity sake in the ether, consideration given to each and everyone word you commit, I was genuinely unaware of what reception I would receive from those around me as I forged my space in this writing community and further afield. Thankfully, this has been an almost entirely positive experience to date, to be surrounded by content creators supporting each other and building each other up really does add to a sense of community that perhaps only exists here with the computer turned on. But maybe, just maybe, there is more to it.

I mentioned this in another answer to another question, my ambition when I started to expand and connect to others was to look at collaborative writing. This is a daunting notion to this with a disposition towards isolation and solitude. Quite literally putting your personal thoughts and perspectives out, not only into the public domain but also in a more intimate sense with the individual curating a joint post or wider project. Equally, and perhaps the most anxiety inducing is the self and cross promotion on social media platforms, seeing a host or a collaborative partner talk about your upcoming post or project in vaunted and positive means whilst it lingers there, unwritten, silently judging you for your inability to produce anything to live up to the optimistic hype being generated. There’s a great many things around the entire notion of writing to meet a shared deadline that can induce panic and anxiety, but thankfully, when you have connected and work within a positive writing community those fears don’t materialise, the pressure is removed and you can write with the best intentions and no artificial constrictions placed upon you.

My first collaborative effort came courtesy of Angie at the Backlog Crusader page who set a challenge to the blogging and writing community looking to interpret video games into literary classics. You can read the original challenge and post there, it was a really enjoyable and fun project to take part in, not only for curating and crafting an article looking to dissect and break down a game, to shape it around a literary framework which of course for me meant looking at The Ocarina of Time but then to read other bloggers articles and pieces around their personal game of choice. Does it add to the greater tapestry of literary discussion? no, greater things have been written about this game by more articulate writers than I, but as an exercise in itself, it was enjoyable to break this game down and craft it around an existing standard of measure, the defined criteria of a classic applied to a digital game. What made the exercise even more enjoyable was the feedback, the comments, the cross collaboration and promotion on each others social media platforms, it was a a really enjoyable collaboration between writers with a common interest.

What do I enjoy and love about the ‘geek’ community, specifically the writing and blogging groups I have joined in the last year, through the interactions alone it has been the overwhelming sense of positivity and support I’ve received and experienced. When you begin to forge your path and stake your corner of the internet, it can be an isolated experience to begin with, the nights creating content you want to share enthusiastically with others because its your voice, and whilst there is no entitlement for others to read, watch or listen to what you’ve created, equally as you begin the process, it’s daunting in its implementation but does become easier as others reach out and comment, discuss, critique and share your content based on its worth and merit. So if I haven’t said it enough, to paraphrase Love Actually, I should have said it every day because everyone has been welcoming on this endeavour so thank you for the support you have shown and given in the last year, it’s such a great community of writers to be involved with.

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