The reason I started this newsletter was because I was sick of only seeing the highlight reels, the personal news klaxons, the big wins of freelancing on social media. I love sharing my wins, but they don’t happen every day or even every week. What’s more, even when I get a win, like getting work published in a Big Name Pub, it doesn’t mean there’s not also some fails hidden behind it too.
Today, I’m going to take you through the lifecycle of an article I wrote, ‘A labor of queer love: the battle to preserve the history of LGBTQ+ games’. It was conceived while I was studying for my MA in Berlin and we were assigned our first feature article project. I did some research and discovered the LGBTQ+ Video Game Archive, a digital project cataloguing and archiving any and all mentions of LGBTQ+ content in video games throughout history.
It was the first time I would be interviewing multiple people and they were based all around the world, from the curator putting together an exhibition based on the archive in a local museum in Berlin to the archivist herself in the US.
Predictably, I messed up the time differences (I still do this now when talking with people in different time zones) and found myself double-booked between the interview and my part-time job. In a panic, I booked myself a meeting room at the office and pretended I was in a work meeting while actually conducting a bilingual interview. I vividly remember trying to record the interview from my phone in the days before I discovered the beauty that is Otter.ai, while my boss looked at me curiously through the glass walls.
Finally, I pulled together all my interviews and wrote the first iteration of my article. I got a good grade, but was also given the feedback that it was confused. Is the story the archive itself, or is it the exhibition in Berlin? Is the story about LGBTQ+ representation, or the difficulty of archiving digital content? I needed to pick a thread and stick with it.
Always one to focus on the negatives, I saw that as a loss, convinced it wasn’t worth taking any further. When the lecturer told us we should all be pitching these stories to see if we can get them picked up, I agreed: the others should. But mine wasn’t up to scratch.
Fast forward 18 months and I’m back in the UK, working as a freelance journalist. I see a pitch callout on Twitter looking for content around LGBTQ+ gaming. My mind immediately went to the Video Game Archive. I pitched on a whim and got it picked up: my first cold pitch ever to be commissioned!
I rewrote the article, updating my information and taking on my editor’s feedback on the pitch. It got put on hold for several months, meaning that when it finally got published, it was a good two-and-a-half years since my original interviews.
The day after publication, I got a Twitter DM that felt like a gut punch. Since I first gathered information, one of the game designers mentioned had started using they/them pronouns and I had therefore misgendered them in my article.
As a queer journalist, I naturally felt awful and moved quickly to get it changed. Luckily, I was working with a fantastic editor who got it updated fast, but I was still kicking myself for the mistake. The designer was very understanding about it and even thanked me for getting it changed so quickly, but it drove home the importance of doing continual research on a story.
Sometimes, the lifecycle of a story will go on for months, but it’s on us to make sure that the information we include is correct and up-to-date. When I look at the article today, I feel proud of how far I’ve come since working on it for my MA, but I also see all the mistakes I made along the way.
This was the first publication I’d worked for that my friends and family recognised, so I got a lot of messages congratulating me on publication. It felt good, but I also felt like a bit of a fraud because all I could see was the ways I’d messed up in getting it done.
Now, I can see that making mistakes is natural and what it also shows about me is that I work hard to right the wrongs I’ve made. I’m not excusing myself from messing up, but it’s also important to acknowledge that sometimes things aren’t as clear as a big win or a big fail. Sometimes, it’s simply mix of both.