I'm a writer

One of the benefits of this new gig? Even though it's unpaid, it's still more-or-less legit writing work, with a byline and everything. It's silly, I suppose, but that really matters to me.

Aside from my internship--which I loved--I never got much of an opportunity to write either in school or with the jobs I got after that. The vast majority of what I've done has been on the techy side instead. I'm a geek and I enjoy pushing buttons to make web stuff look pritty, but at my core, I'm all about content. I like researching and reporting stories, I like writing them and I like making decisions about what kinds of stories should get the most attention. I'm a journalist, after all, not just someone who knows how to write a bit of HTML and futz around with photo and video editing. My greatest strength is in synthesizing disparate bits of information into a comprehensive package.

So it's really very gratifying to me to be able to do that, to a degree, with this thing. It's not straight reporting--I'm a columnist, more or less, not a news reporter--but I'm still creating stories, which feels really good. I don't consider myself a genius at this, and I may not yet be anywhere near truly following in the footsteps of my beloved Molly Ivins, but I feel a hell of a lot closer to that now than I did before.

Plus, the cool side benefit is that I now feel comfortable actually calling myself a writer when random people ask what I do. The multi-hyphenate Dilbertspeak jumble of what I was doing before never made for great small talk. Now, I can just spit out a word or two, and people both know and respect what that means. Awesome.