All podcast content by Mark Rosewater
Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that
means, it’s time for another Drive to Work.
Okay. So, I do these ahead of time, so sometimes it’s hard
to plan. But if my math is correct, some time somewhat recently, I just wrote
my 600th column of Making Magic. Okay, technically I had my 600th
week, since not every week I write a column.
But anyway, 600 weeks is still quite the accomplishment. I
have figured out that I have written two million words in my column. Two
million words! Which is pretty impressive in the sense that I don’t know how
many people in their life write two million words, and I managed to do it just
about designing Magic in this
column.
So yeah, today I’m going to talk a little bit about my
writing and my column, and… I don’t know, just share some stories and talk a
little bit about the ins and outs of doing a column. So, let’s do a little background.
I’ve talked before on the podcast about how I got my foot in the door at
Wizards, and that was through writing. And puzzle-making, I guess. But pretty
much my start at Wizards was—had to do with my writing.
I—my background is writing, I’m a pretty strong writer, and
I was able to turn things in on time and I came up with good topics and so I
ended up writing a lot of stuff in the early days. Eventually, by the way, I—or
pretty early on, I had a Magic puzzle
column called Magic: The Puzzling,
and then I started writing a column that was an answer column called Magic Tricks.
And I had some fun in that column, for those that have ever
read that, I would tell this story that I would interweave my answers, but
rather than just give the answers, I would weave the story—it was just a silly
story, kind of a soap opera thing, it’s where I introduced my evil twin, and—you
have to read it, I guess. It just was me being extra silly, and there was this
kind of soap opera plot intertwined through which I would then explain the
answers to the puzzles.
Eventually, once I got to Wizards I started writing a column
called Insider Trading, which was—it was just a column in which I would tease
things, and—the flavor of the column was always like—you know, I—while I worked
inside, I was one of you guys on the outside, and I was like a mole on the
inside feeding you information, I don’t know if that made any sense, but that
was the original idea of the column.
And then when I became the editor-in-chief, I began writing
the front… I don’t know what to call it, but like the—you know, the letter from
the editor or whatever. And it was called “Mark My Words.” And eventually—I think
those are most of my columns. I wrote one or two other little things. I wrote
some stuff online for Sideboard and… but anyway, we got to the making of Magicthegathering.com/Dailymtg.
So what happened was, when I was putting it together, I knew
I wanted some inside columns. And I knew I was interested in doing one of them.
I decided that I wanted a design column and a development column. And from Day
1 I knew I wanted to write the design column.
So like one of the—one of my things right now is that I’m—I have
written about Magic continuously
longer than any other person. Because I go back to ’94 writing, and I’ve been
writing continuously since 1994. I also believe I have written the most words about
Magic, although Mike Flores might—if
anybody beats me, it’s Mike Flores.
I’m not sure, he and I have both written so much that I don’t
think anybody wants to spend the time to go and count the words. And not
everything we’ve written is readily available on the internet. So even if
someone wanted to do the task, I’m not sure. So anyway, I’ll just say Flores
and I are tied and that we both have written some crazy number of words on Magic.
But. So the idea was, I wanted to do a design column, and—so
one of the things that was important to me was that each column had a purpose.
And so the purpose of the design column was to sort of capture the essence of
design. And so it was very important to me that the column itself kind of
mirrored what I—how I wanted design to be presented.
And so I definitely wanted design to be thought of as being
creative, I wanted design to be thoughtful, I wanted it to be something which
could be explained, you know, I wanted people to understand that there were
rules we followed but we broke our rules sometimes, and I really wanted the
column to sort of walk people through what we do.
And one of the things that I’ve discovered is, that I write
a weekly column on design. On game design. That’s a very rare thing because
most people who do game design don’t write about it just because—I’m lucky to
have a place where people let me write about what I do and, you know, believe
in my philosophy of sharing it with the public. Because one of the things I
believe is that Magic is a better
game for its makers interacting so closely with the players, and that I like
explaining why we do things. Because sometimes you go “Oh, I might not have
seen that, but you walk me through it and get some appreciation for things you
would not get an appreciation for. And likewise, it opens up a two-way, you
know, conversation, where we get feedback and that feedback’s very valuable for
learning what worked and didn’t work.
Okay, so today I’m going to talk about the making of my
column. And I feel like there’s a bunch of different kinds of columns I write. I
often say that writing my column is much like making cards in that I have many
different audiences that I am addressing. That I’m on a—people often call it
the Mothership, you know, Magicthegathering.com/Daily Magic MTG is—hey, we’re
the man.
You know, we’re the people who make the game. And so we have
access to behind-the-scenes information that nobody does. And so, you know, I’m
writing a column that nobody else could write. Which is a huge—like, one of the
biggest problems about writing about anything, but, you know, Magic, let’s say, is just trying to get
a take that’s your own.
I mean, the two big things about writing, by the way, about
writing a column is, one, you have to have a distinct take that’s your own, and
you have to have a voice that’s your own. Now the good news for me is, because
I’ve written a lot, I found my voice as a writer a while ago, and so you know,
that’s one of the hardest things is, I’ve talked about this, I did an interview
long ago, where I said that I think if you write a column, and people could
just take your name off it and put somebody else’s name on it and nobody would
know, then like what are you doing? That part of what you want to do is you
want to stand out and make a claim that’s your own.
Part of that is content, part of that is presentation. Content
I’m lucky, because I’m doing something no one else can talk about. So when I
talk about Magic design, I mean, I
mean, you know, the closest is the Development column and I overlap in areas. But
I’m really writing about stuff that’s uniquely to my own. And then
presentation, you know, I’ve been writing a long time. My background is in
writing. In fact, of all the skills that I have, I use in my job, writing is
the one that goes back the farthest. I’ve been writing the longest. And so it’s
true back in the day, you know, I wrote different kinds of things than I write
now, but like I said. I’ve written two million words on—literally just in the
column Making Magic.
So I have some expertise to—I’ve put in my ten thousand
hours that they say. Because Malcolm Gladwell, and the book Outliers talks
about how to become an expert at something you need to put in ten thousand
hours of constant feedback. Which I—my writing, I believe I have.
Okay, so let’s talk about the different kinds of columns. So
some of the columns I do are the—the regular mill columns, which is preview
columns, or I do, you know, card-by-card where I talk about stories, or there’s
just a lot of like, you know, “Hey, this is—the site is there to make sure you
know about upcoming stuff,” so some of my writing is just doing that. Is just
previewing things.
But some of my writing I get to stretch a little bit, and I
get a—you know, sometimes I do sort of what I’m there for, and sometimes I
stretch a little bit, and one of the things I like as a writer is that I’ve had
the opportunity to do—a giant swath of different kinds of writing. So—so for
example, sometimes I have been able to really go a little more out there. So
let me talk about some of my more out-there columns.
So the one that gets the most mail, or got the most mail, is
a column called Elegance.
And what Elegance was is, it was a column with a very elegant idea. But—and then
this is the interesting thing. People don’t realize that Elegance is actually a
two-part article. Two weeks after Elegance, I wrote another article talking
about Elegance. And in that article I explained what I was up to in Elegance,
and I think a lot of people who read Elegance don’t go on to read the article
after it. I think it’s called A Response to Elegance? Or An
Elegant Response. An Elegant Response.
So—but anyway, it was a column in which you got there, and
it was a fifty-word column in which every word hyperlinked to a fifty-word
column. And that column was beloved and behated. Yes, behated is a word I
invented. And it was interesting. It really, really split people down the
middle. Like, some people, like, it was the best article I’ve ever written, and
some article, like, hated it. Hated
hated hated hated it.
But I feel a lot about my articles like I do about my card
design, in which, like, one of my favorite sayings is, if you make something
that everybody likes but nobody loves,
you will fail. And my column is the same way. I would much rather make columns
where some people absolutely love it and others don’t like it at all than just
make a column where everyone goes “Eh, you know, it’s okay.” You know. And that—I
wanted to sort of get some passion out of people.
And Elegance was just
me trying to do something. But once again, if you go look at Elegance, and you
hadn’t before, you’ve got to read the article two weeks later, because I
explain—I was up to something. Like I said, I’m not afraid to experiment. I did
another article… some of my articles I have to be careful not to talk about because
some of the point of the article—like there’s an article I did called Mons
Made Me Do It, where the fun of the article, if I tell you what I did, it
misses some of the fun of it. So like go read it. I don’t want to tell you what
I did. You know.
I did an article called 80,000
Words where I did a tour of the building. And the whole article is 80
pictures of me—80,000 Words, a lot of people don’t get that. So it’s 80
pictures, because a picture is worth a thousand words. Thus it’s 80,000 words.
A lot of people didn’t get that. But anyway, I even went back and did an annotated
version (part
II), the Director’s Cut,
where I explain each of the pictures. But it’s just me giving a tour of
Wizards, me and a little whiteboard where I write things on it.
I also did a Choose Your Own Adventure pretty early on
called A
Day in the Life, because a lot of people had asked me what it’s like being
at Wizards, and so I—I did a Choose Your Own Adventure. Which it was fun. It
was very accurate of my day at the time, although it was a long, long, long
time ago, so it’s not accurate of my current day. This was—this was back when I
was, I think I was in Design at that point, but it might even have been—I might
have even been a developer, not yet a designer, although I think I was a
designer at that point. I was clearly not Head Designer yet, that’s for sure.
The other thing that I—I’ve done is I’ve made a bunch of
subtype articles. Here’s how you can tell that I—I’ve written my article so
long that I have like sub-branding. Like Making Magic is the main brand, I’ve done some sub-brands. So let me talk about a few of my sub-brands.
Okay. So there’s Topical Blend. So in college, I did
improvisation. For those that don’t know what that is, it’s when you get up on
stage and you say to the audience “Okay, I need you to give me a relationship. A
place. Whatever.” You ask the audience for input. And then you make a scene
based on the audience’s input. And the fact that the audience knows you’re making
it up is, they gave you the input. You couldn’t have had the scene already,
they gave you what to do with.
And I love improvisation because I like—I enjoy the kind of,
you know, thinking on your feet and being fast and making stuff up and, you know,
being spontaneous. And I enjoy that. And so I really enjoyed doing improv.
So I was trying to kind of get an improv feel to my column.
I wanted a challenge and I thought like, okay. So the idea of a Topical Blend,
in case you’ve never seen one, is I ask the audience for a list of Magic topics and a list of non-Magic topics. And then, I take the top
vote-getter in each category and I blend them together.
So the first Topical Blend I did, the topic was “the ten
biggest design mistakes you’ve made” and the non-Magic topic was”girls.” So I wrote an article—Topical
Blend #1, To Err is Human, which talked about my dating life and compared
my foibles in dating with my mistakes in design. And the interesting thing is,
it is one of the best articles I’ve ever written. Maybe the best article I’ve
ever written. It’s up there. And I never would have gotten there without me
experimenting like this. I never ever ever would have gotten there. And so I—I like
the fact that I was willing to stretch a little bit, and I feel like the end
result was something that was truly special.
So Topical
Blend #2 was “designing a sixth color” and “Mark Rosewater is bleeping…
batbleep insane?” Which was a thread—there was a humor site called Mise Tings
that used to do a lot of humor, and they used to have a thread that would pop
up all the time, where, you know, ”MaRo is batbleep insane.”
And so anyway, that won, and so I—my article, which confused
a lot of people, to this day, was when you went to the article, instead, you
went to the forums of what was looked like a Mise Tings forum, where instead of
reading the article you read people responding to the article. And then I wrote
snippets of the article that people would quote. But the point was, the article
itself was people responding to the fake article that didn’t exist. And that
concept confused people! I got—it was a little out there. I liked it, I thought
it was a very good article. But it was out there, and it confused a lot of
people.
My third Topical Blend—oh by the way, the name “Topical
Blend,” my wife came up with that. We were looking for a name for the
sub-brand, you know, for the column, and my wife came up with that. I really
like it. Also, by the way, the sign that I did something interesting is that I
have had numerous other people do Topical Blends. That’s a sign that, to me, of
success of something, is other people said “Ooh, I’m going to do that.”
And Gavin Verhey did one, and… did Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar? Someone
who took over my column for one of our switch column weeks did one. And I think
a few people have done them on other sites. But anyway—and by the way, that’s
very—I’m honored by the fact that other people would try to do it. From a
writing standpoint, by the way, it’s very interesting, and I mean any writers
out there that like a challenge, it is a
nice challenge.
My third
Topical Blend was “my top ten favorite creatures in Magic” and “Dungeons and Dragons.” Which I—I felt was a little too
easy, so I stretched a little bit. My fourth
Topical Blend… was that the one I did? Was about magic—not the game Magic, but like “poof,” you know, like,
you know, like rabbits out of hats. And what was the… because I was a magician
in my youth, so I talk about being a magician in my youth. What was the
crossover topic?
Anyway, all these are—everything I’m talking about, so every
hundred columns, and ideally I should have just
written one from your time—I do a thing called One
Hundred and Counting. And then Two
Hundred and Counting and then Three
Hundred and Counting. Where I review—I preview—or, not review. I review. I
review my last hundred columns and I give them a grade from one to five.
Oh, people always ask this, by the way—“Why—where are the
ones? Where are the twos?” Like, the reason that the scale has ones and twos
is, I have written ones and twos, I try not to, I write them infrequently, and
if I realize I’ve written a one or a two I rewrite it. That’s why most of them
are three or better. Because that’s my borderline acceptable.
But I try to keep a scale that’s true for all the years. I
don’t want to keep changing the scale. But since I’ve had ones and twos in the
past, like, well, that exists on the scale, but I try to avoid them and I haven’t
written a one in a while. I haven’t written my six hundredth article, so I don’t
know whether I have a one or a two. But I don’t think I have a one. I might have
a two.
Okay. Other sub-brands. Nuts
and Bolts! So Nuts and Bolts was an article that started because I thought
that people might be interested in some of the more mundane parts of the job.
And it ended up shifting from that to being more of a primer about how to do
design.
I did, by the way, do a bunch of articles that were loosely
connected. Design
101, Design
102, Design
103, where I talked about beginning design mistakes. Nuts and Bolts was a
little more like “Let me technically walk through how we make cards.” And I
talked about design skeletons and how to fill them in and—(???) More so
originally it was supposed to be more like “Let me talk about what mundane
tasks,” and it more became “How to kind of process—how to do the process of
making a set yourself.”
Another sub-brand I do is called “State
of Design.” So when I took over as head designer, I liked how every year
the president of the United States does what’s called the “State of the Union.”
Where he sort of talks about how he feels the country’s doing. And I thought “Oh,
that would be neat for me to talk about how I felt design was doing.”
And what I do is I usually have the chance to look at the
previous year, and I try to be critical and say “Okay, what did we do right and
what did we do wrong?” And try to sort of get an honest take on, you know, the
lessons of the year but also the successes of the year. And sort of just look
at it all.
Any other? The other thing that—I guess it’s not—I haven’t
branded, sub-branded it, but another thing that I do, and I do it once or twice
a year, is what I call—I’ve kind of been loosely calling the Rosewater Files.
Which is they’re kind of personal stories where—what happened was, I wrote the
first Topical Blend, and it was a real personal column. I was talking about my
dating life. I mean they were really actual personal stories.
And I said that I—people really enjoyed it, and as a writer
I said “Okay, well I like this, let me find a way from time to time to tell
more personal stories. And I’ll find a way to tie them into Magic.” And since then I’ve done a
bunch of different ones. I wrote an article about life
lessons (part
II), I wrote an article about things that I took from—lessons I’ve learned
from design that applied to my life. I wrote about my wedding
with my wife (part
II). I wrote
about my kids (part
II). I wrote about my
time on Roseanne (part
II), which was a pretty dramatic—ex—huge roller coaster from exciting
to very traumatic, you know, I wrote about that.
And so I—I really like the personal columns, because they
show off something about me—like one of the things I feel is very important is,
I—my goal in all my writing is that I don’t want Magic just made by faceless people.
I feel like a lot of times, people are faced with—the things that they
love, if they come from some faceless entity, it’s hard to bond because it’s
like “Well, I don’t know who that is.”
But that like—people bond with people. And I really feel
like, you know, I want—I want to be one of the faces for the game. That I want
people to say “I have some faith in Magic
because I have some faith in Mark.” You know. And I think that it’s really
important, and one of the things that I’ve tried hard with my columns and with
the website is that I don’t want Magic
being some faceless entity. I want it being actual people that you identify
with. And I want to explain what we want to—like a big part of my column is, I
want to walk through and explain what we are doing. You know.
And at some level—I mean, I feel like we’re paving new
ground. There is no game company out there that spends the time and energy to
explain to their audience what they are up to. You know. I mean, it’s funny
because sometimes I think players get so used to it that, you know, that they
forget that like, you know, once upon a time, people made a game and it got
spit out and you’re lucky if they wrote something about it. You know.
We—I write a weekly column every week where I explain to you
what we’re doing! And why we’re doing it, you know, and, I mean, you know,
yeah, I can’t explain everything, but I explain a lot. And I go into great
detail. You know. And I walk you through our processes. And that—that is—I mean,
that’s a big part of what I started the column to do, and then I’m very, very
happy that the column does do.
Now, I’ve expanded out since then. You know, since this
column started I now do a lot of social media in addition, you know, I have my
daily comic, I have my week—I have my daily blog. I have a weekly podcast
obviously. So I’ve expanded beyond just doing the column. But the column is
kind of my core, if you will, you know, they talk about how like Star Wars has
the expanded universe. But at the core of it is the film. At the core of my—you
know, the Rosewater Expanded Universe is my column. It really is the heart of
what I do.
And in some ways, it’s the most personal. I mean, not that I’m
not personal in my podcast or in my blog, but those are done quicker. I mean,
my podcast I talk for thirty minutes while I drive to work, and my blog I
answer stuff quickly while, you know, but my column I take a lot more time on,
and I think about, and I—I rewrite, and, you know, it’s the only thing that I
rewrite. You know. Hey, when I’m recording, I’m recording, and when I’m done, (???)
my thirty minutes. And my blog, I don’t—I mean, I might proof my answer after I
write it, but I’m not doing a lot of rewriting. Or—maybe on a few very special
questions. But most of the time I just answer the question.
So… Making Magic to me is the one that I take
extra care on. I mean, I actually work at home on Fridays because I work on my
column on Fridays. That is important enough that I want to be able to, you
know, really just give some time to it.
The other thing people ask me about is the theme weeks. Let
me talk about theme weeks a little bit. So, when I set up the column, or the
website, I decided that I wanted every other week to be a theme week. And the
reason I did that was a couple things. One was it was a gift to the writers,
which is it is a lot harder to write anything than to write something. And that
if I tell you “Hey, write anything you want,” it can be scary almost at times.
The blank page can be intimidating. But if I said to you, “Write—write about
the circus.” You know. Then you’d go “Oh, okay.”
And the other thing is, the themes force people down paths
that you might not have been forced down. Much like the Topical Blend. I never,
ever, ever would have written that article. But I’m glad I did. You know. I
talk about Mons Made Me Do It. That’s an article I wrote for Goblin Week. And I
don’t think I ever would have gotten to that column if it hadn’t been Goblin
Week and I’m just like “I’m writing a goblin column.” You know, but I did, and
there have been a lot of columns that started because I was just trying to
match something.
Like I did a column for Zombie Week. I don’t remember the
name of this one. Well, there are two Zombie Weeks. The first zombie week one I
did, by the way, was actually a very—a fan favorite called I
cc: Dead People. Which might be my favorite title ever of a column. In
which the premise of the column was that each creature type has a liaison that
communicates with us to talk about their happiness or unhappiness with how they’re
portrayed.
And Ga’Aark was the leader of the zombies, or the liaison of
zombies, and the article was him writing letters to me, talking about the
treatment of zombies. And really it was me just going through the history of
zombies in Magic. And talking about
how they ebbed and flowed. But it just had a nice spin to it.
I have done from time to time, my creative writing will pop
out, and, you know, I’ve done a bunch of columns from the point of view of,
like I did a point
of view of a common card when I did the Mirrodin review. I’ve done—I did—so
I’ve done columns all about the color pie, in fact I’ve done a whole bunch of
different parts of the color pie. I did ones about individual colors, I did the
two color pairings, and then I did one where I interviewed each color. (White
Black
Green
Blue
Red)
I did that during Shards of Alara theme weeks, where like it was, whatever, it
was Esper week, so, you know, Esper’s centered in blue. So I interviewed blue
and had in blue’s own words talk about what he believed and didn’t believe.
And so you can tell my, sort of my background pops out. Like
I like writing dialogue, so from time to time—one of the things I definitely
have made one of my trademarks is putting in snippets of dialogue. I’ll do that
from time to time. I also have made a big deal out of using asides, I’ve made
that one of my trademark things. I do a lot of parenthetical asides, which I
like. Ooh, traffic! So extra content for you. So… the… I was talking about…
see, I lost my train of thought. I got stuck in traffic and I’m like “What was
I talking about?” I was talking about writing—oh, from point of view columns. I
do—like I said, yeah, I like the—I like my parentheticals.
Another sort of trait that I’ve taken up that I like is I
like sort of starting somewhere that doesn’t seem like it’s what this is about,
and then slowly working your way to like get to the point where it is what the
topic is about. That comes from my writing—that comes from my film background.
That’s a big trick in film, where you start your story and you’re like “What’s
going—what’s going on?” And the scene, and you know, and you slowly, like,
things that seemed disparate slowly come together. So I—I enjoy that.
Oh, by the way, my zombie column. So I talked about how we
did two Zombie Weeks. The first zombie column was about I cc: Dead People, the
second one I had already done a column about zombies, and so I came up with the
idea of doing a column about mechanics that had died but come back, and I wrote
it in a style of a, like a story, in which all of R&D gets killed. And I
enjoyed that, I thought it was a lot of fun.
That it was a very different take on—that’s another thing
that I do now is, because we get theme weeks in which I’ve already done the
theme week once before, I try to find
new ways to approach it. You know. That like, that I—oh, if I did something one
way, I try to find a different way.
I mean, the thing that I—that is important to understand is
that—I talked about this in my Tales from the Pit podcast. Which is “Why do I
write? Why?” Because for example, Latest Developments, I think Sam, Sam
Stoddard just started writing Latest Developments. He is, if I’m correct, the
sixth person to write Latest Developments. It was Randy, and then Aaron, and
then Devin, and then Tom, and then Zach, and now Sam. And in between there was
points where there was like rotating and stuff. So why is it? Why is it that
there have been six people wrote the Development column and I’m the same guy
writing all the Design columns?
And the answer is, because I love to write. I love the act
of writing. I am a writer. One of the things they say is “How do you tell if
you’re a writer?” And the answer is “Because you write.” And what that means is
that, like, writers just have a need to write. And I understand this is one of
the reasons that I do write. In that there’s something—something about the
writing mindset that just, you need to get things out, and you need to sort of—it’s
part of the way that you process things.
Like one of the things that’s very interesting about my
column is, a lot of the interesting observations I’ve made about Magic came about me trying to explain
them. And put them into words. And they made me realize something that I then
went back and said “Oh my God, guys, I’ve figured something out because I had
to write about it.” And that I find writing to be an awesome way to sort of
clear your head and lets you sort of to look inside yourself.
Another thing that’s important is, I feel that—that writing
is a chance to kind of share in a very unique and interesting way. That it’s a
part to make yourself sort of something bigger than just yourself. And I—I don’t know. I appreciate that. I find
writing to be a great joy for me.
And that’s not to say it’s not—let me walk you through—how do
I make a Making Magic? So what
happens is, either I—it’s a theme week, so I know my topic, or it’s an off
week, and a lot of the off weeks, while they might not be theme weeks, they’re,
like whenever we get near a set I have to do previews, I normally do a
card-by-card right after the set comes out. So I have a bunch of stuff that I
kind of do that whether or not it’s a planned thing, it’s—I mean, it might not
be a theme week, but it’s planned.
And then on the off weeks, when I’m sort of away from a set,
when I can do whatever I want, I slowly build up an inventory of things I want
to do. And the way that—the way it works, by the way, is I’ll come up with both
neat ideas for columns, and I’ll come up with topics. Like I knew I wanted to
do an all-picture column, but I just didn’t know—it took me a while to figure
out what I wanted it to be. And then one day I’m like “Oh, oh oh oh oh oh. I
want to give a tour, oh, a tour would work well with pictures.” Or “I want to
talk about my day, a Choose Your Own
Adventure would be a good life in day—you know, day in the life of R&D.”
And so a lot of the times it’s finding the right idea with the right thing. And
I like to experiment, you know, Elegance shows, like, Elegance was not—was not
universally loved. There have been ones that really liked it. But there are
people that hated it. I mean hated it.
So here’s another interesting thing. So one of the things
about my column is, I get a thread, I always read my thread, I always read my
mail. My mail tends to be a little nicer than my thread. I don’t know why, my
thread is a more—they—they’re a lively bunch. I do read them though. I do read
it every week.
And I mean, the feed—so another important part of my column,
one of like the great, you know, gifts of my column is the feedback. And I, I
value the feedback very greatly. Because part of doing my job is understanding
what the audience wants. And so part of doing that is creating a rapport with
the audience so that the audience feels like they can write to me, and like one
of the reasons I want to be a—not a, to be a name and a person rather than some
faceless thing is, I want people to feel like they can confide in me and say
what they like and don’t’ like. You know. I want people to be able to be honest
and say, “Hey, you did such and such. That upset me.” Or “You did this, that
was awesome.” Or whatever. Whatever the feedback is, I want to be able to get
that and that’s really important to me. And so—anyway, I just—I had to stop
short, and my list of all my stuff went away! So I’m going to have to wing it
from here out.
Yeah, I don’t know if you guys know this, but I’ve started
making notes for my podcast because what I’ve learned is if I write little
notes down then I will try not to forget things, and if I don’t then I—I will
sometimes—I will park my car, I used to—early on I would park my car, and go “Oh
my God, I didn’t talk about such-and-such, how did I not talk about it?” So now
I give myself little notes.
You heard a little screech earlier. See, those are little
sound effects of my car. You can kind of tell what’s going on. I had someone
pull out ahead of me, and I had to screech my breaks so not to hit them. So you
got a—and also, if you listen to me talk sometimes, (???) sometimes I will
talk, and like you kind of can tell that my attention is not 100% on my
podcast. That is because I am trying not to crash my car.
Usually it’s pretty easy going, I’m on, I’m on, it’s all
remote brain activity that’s doing fine, but when actions happen. So I, I do
try to be safe, so for those that worry I’m not paying attention, I’m very much
actually paying attention. Luckily, I’m good at talking to myself because I did
improv for many years.
And… yeah, I talked about this in my wedding column, which
is I decided in my vows for my wife that I didn’t want to write them out ahead
of time. Because I wanted them to feel not rehearsed but sort of fresh, and so
I—I winged them. And most people, like—that’s what I’m trying to explain, I’m
very comfortable sort of talking on my feet. And so when you’re willing to wing
your vows at your wedding, odds are you’re comfortable sort of—you’re
comfortable winging things. So. But I do like that I have some structure to the
podcast. I’ve learned that—I think it helps.
Anyway, I’ve come to Wizards. So—I don’t know. Today was
more me trying to explain a little bit about one side of me. Making Magic is definitely a very personal
part of what I do. I mean, so is card design, so is other things. But my
writing is something that I—I’m happy that I found a place in this job to use
my writing skills, because I’m very proud of my writing, and I feel like I have
a lot to offer as a writer. And so I’m really happy that, you know, I have
Making Magic, and I have a place
where weekly I can share with people and talk with them, and that that’s—it’s—I
think it’s both good for Magic and
it is good for me as a human being. So I’m glad that I have it.
Anyway, thank you very much for listening and for—for those
that have read the eleven years so far that I’ve been writing, I plan to keep
on continuing, so check in. And you’ll see me making Magic every week. Speaking of that, I have to now go to work!
Because not only do I make Magic in
my column, but also at work I’m always making Magic. Talk to you guys next week.
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