A few weeks ago, I was cleaning out some old papers from Baron’s filing cabinet and came across a receipt dated August 8, 2014. I smiled as I remembered that night. It was a Friday, and I was curled up in front of a fan, banging randomly on my laptop keys in the hope of actually writing something I was interested in enough to finish. The sun was down well before Baron arrived home, but the air was still warm and sticky when he walked through our front door and handed me the bag.
“I got you the nicest set they had,” he said nervously. “It was a little more expensive than the regular audio-jack sets, but Bio said that the USB ones were a lot better connection, and, well…”
I turned the package around in my hands and raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you want me talking with your friends? I mean, they are internet people.” Since I started filling in as interim co-host earlier that summer, I had started participating in the banter in Rivalcast’s IRC chat during shows, and it was fun. But actually talking to someone outside of that structure was a different ballgame.
“You already know Varyar and Highlander in real life. And you’ve talked with Bio and Edge before.” Both of these statements were true; Matt and Adam had been friends for years, Adam for so long he’d even served as a groomsman in my brother-in-law’s wedding. I’d spoken with the ones known as Edge and Bio for a little bit when they helped salvage our first live broadcast attempt of our summer ghost hunt, newly christened by listeners as ‘Orbfest,’ and both seemed nice enough. “Besides,” Baron continued, “they want to talk to you. You have fans now.”
I grimaced and looked down at the package again. “I don’t see how, or why. Ghost in the Podcast is your show. I’m just filling in temporarily – I don’t want to be a podcaster.”
Baron smiled knowingly. “Face it, honey,” he said as he bent over to kiss the top of my head. “You already are.”
*****
My primary focus when I got involved with RCM was, and remains, writing. I’ve always done better with conveying thoughts and information through text than I ever have verbally; when left to my own devices, I’m much more apt to spend a free evening alone curled up in my favorite chair with the laptop than I am to be out roaming the town with my girl friends. There was a time in my life when making phone calls to strangers for any reason induced mild panic attacks – one of the many reasons I’ve hailed online pizza ordering as a godsend. I’m not quite as bad now, but when it comes down to it I am an extremely shy person and I constantly worry when meeting and interacting with new people.
Which makes the fact that I moderate RCM On Tap live every Friday night that much more mind-boggling, and the botched intros every week a little more understandable.
To be fair, a lot has changed since that summer night just over a year ago. The RCM of August 2014, when I reluctantly plugged in that headset for the first time, looked a lot different from the RCM of today. We’ve seen new shows launched as old shows retired. A lot of our shows made the jump from audio podcasts to video productions when we moved to Twitch. RCM Creative’s pulled off some phenomenal skits and tie-ins for shows and written work. We’ve watched our community grow as we started building friendships with other networks, and strengthen as we cultivated existing connections through various meet-ups and events like Orbfest. My personal pride has been centered around RCM Writing, both the fact that we’ve been building stable, consistent writers publishing regular and varied content to the main page and that I’ve had the honor of playing a big part in that. Making the jump from frustratedly banging on my keyboard, wishing I had enough confidence to put my work out for the world to see, to not only pushing out regular chapters of the ongoing RCM Saga, but blogs and articles on top of that and helping other people get their content out into the world – that’s huge.
But what’s even bigger is having a super-secret turtle team to prod me along when I have those occasional moments of forgetting what a badass I’m supposed to be. Because for all the kicking and screaming I did a year ago, those first “internet people” I interacted with – from the comfort of my favorite chair – turned out to be amazing. So amazing, in fact, that I wanted to tell their stories.
Thus we see the girl who used to hyperventilate at the thought of dialing pizza shops on a telephone suddenly finding herself broadcasting video-chats every Friday evening with RCM community members from around the world. It’s still a surreal experience, but one I’ve come to look forward to. And I may still let my nerves botch my intros every week, but I’ll get it eventually. Probably completely by accident.
Kind of like how I accidentally became a podcaster.
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