Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog

Making a living because of something you love /enjoy doing is something I want to aspire to,  and I would say most Wow bloggers enjoy/love playing Wow because they write about it, but they do it for free.

I’ve mulled over legitimizing my writing  a little more by attaching my real name.  Making money from my blog is not what I intend, but I call myself a writer.  I’ve been paid and published, but I  haven’t quite worked out  if  I want  this blog to sit on my Writing bibliography. 625 posts, and about 2.5 years of writing. I’m a little proud. Actually I’m very proud.  It’s my greatest body of work – I feel like I would be omitting something from my writing history if I didn’t ‘claim’ it.

I also think about some of the great talent we see that uses  WOW as the axis idea, and motivation.  Blogs,  RP, Comics, Mechanima, music, craft, podcasting, add on developers. We use wow to practise, and apply a  craft, or talent.  Most people don’t get paid. All of these rely on donations,  or ad revenue if they choose ( which surely can’t be a lot)  and  people’s free time to produce.  The only thing I can think of that people get paid for,  would be for submitting /writing for a tech mag with a budget to pay,  or places like wow.com, or MMO champion.   I know a couple of bloggers that have paypal donation buttons,  one, Tobold uses it to buy things that he writes about, others to cover things like hosting costs, domain registrations, and so on.   A contributing reason for me not wanting to earn money from this blog is it has a very low  upkeep cost. Just the yearly name registration and mapping fee.  I’m happy not to host it for now,  and I didn’t even need to have my own domain,  but I wanted to.

I don’t want a paypal donation button, and I can’t see it being worth the compromise from the little money I would earn to put my own ads on here.  Though I really should pay to remove WordPress ads.  ( but that becomes another expense.)

I need to work on polishing my writing a lot more, and some better more generic topics, maybe try to find more than WOW to write about,  and I think I am doing that a lot more lately.  Or tying Wow back to bigger issues.  625 posts though is  a lot of practise.  I think I’m getting better.  The idea being is that I would like to write worthy enough stuff to get paid for it.

It’s annoys me feed stealers can plonk my entire post on their website,  surround it with ads, and make money off what I don’t, but that’s another issue all together.

It’s also  little sad creatively,  that even though the words in this blog are all mine,  my ideas are all mine  they would not exist but for the creative talent,  and copyrighted ideas of other people. I stopped writing fan fic when I was into Voyager.  I have the potential to create my own original ideas,  and get full credit for it,   I don’t need someone elses characters to work with.

I also only have my audience because of someone elses talent,  and copyright ownership.  I can’t even claim original illustration – I only have this ‘freedom’ under a creative commons,   As for my audience. Wow has made what I write about interesting enough to read by  more people than I could have ever dreamed.  I don’t think my real life is exciting enough for people to want to read about it.

It’s all well and good to have a passion, and I know people have hobbies that don’t make them money. My weirdest hobby was  waving a wooden stick (Bokken) around a local park for 12 months doing sword lessons.  Fun, but yes people thought I was odd – I spent a bit of money.  Lessons, grading,  and two bokkens that are  on display  in my lounge room to scare my dates, but  I stopped my singing lessons because I couldn’t justify the expense for that that hobby when I had a mortgage.  

I worked out  that while  I love playing WOW  my passion  is actually  Writing,  and I use writing about wow as a substitution for writing about other things, but I don’t think that without being able to stretch my writers wings by blogging about Wow,  I would have ever tried to write  more than fiction.  I am very much aware how closely tied my gaming is with my blogging about Wow.  If either were to stop, the other would, unless I could find a topic I was interested in enough to come up with new things  to talk about.

I have a passion for writing – probably should knuckle down and learn to be  a better one.  We used to call self publishing authors as vanity publishers.  You weren’t good enough for a real publisher to take you so you did it yourself.  Blogging is a form of vanity publishing.  guaranteed a space  on the internet.  I’ve made some money from writing. Not lately though, but yes I want to earn money from my passion for writing.

Just need to write  more stuff that does not bounce off someone elses ideas.