Games.

I programmed my first games on a TRS-80 micro my mom picked up for me at a garage sale in the late 80s. If you're not familiar, this was a little keyboard that you could hook up to your television. I loved video games and computers as much as I loved reading and writing - and as we were not well off, that mostly meant nigh-obsolete machines picked up for cheap somewhere.

Before highschool I had the TRS-80, a Timex-Sinclaire ZX Spectrum clone, an Atari 400, and a Commodore 64. I wasn't a great programmer - I could make my own text parser in BASIC and type in listings from old magazines and library books - but I had fun.

Later there were game creation tools that made things easier. Unlimited Adventures let you make your own "Gold Box" style RPGs, but where it really clicked for me was the C-like coding involved with TADS - the Text Adventure Design System. What did it was access to the rec.arts.interactive-fiction newsgroup on usenet.

(Old Man Internet Aside: We had Prodigy, not AOL, and my first exposure to the internet was via telnet, FTP sites, gopher, and archie. I'd heard about the "World Wide Web" but was not impressed. This is also where I began seriously engaging with anticapitalist and anarchist thought - as seriously as a teenager in the mid-90s could be expected to, at any rate.)

Anyway, being able to collaborate with internet strangers, actually share games, and get real feedback was tremendous.

Anyway, games. I dabbled. I helped out in some game jams. In the late 2010s I started doing a bit of freelance narrative design consultancy on projects that - largely - failed to ever manifest. In 2022 I decided to pivot from novelist to full-on narrative designer at one of the worst possible times in the industry, just as the waves of layoffs started to kick in.

I've always had great timing.