I answered a request a toy dealer put out looking for columnists to try and get traffic up on his site. Honestly I was never much of a writer and never had any formal training but I go through spells where I enjoy trying to put pen to paper. The first "trial piece" I wrote was a description of my favorite action figure and why.

Cross Country

He seemed to enjoy it enough to put it on his site and asked what else I had in the tank.

I decided to give a history of one my favorite aspects of GI Joe, Ninjas!!! I wrote this over the course of a week and breaking it down year by year was a fun but tedious task.

I've got some other ideas but these last couple months have been busy for me and I've had little time to gather my thoughts. There's no payment involved for these so I feel like he's getting his money's worth. Give them a look if you've got the time and I'll gladly take critiques here.

_________________

As someone that just recently came to a contractual agreement with an artist for a project i offer my SINCERE congratulations (because i can somewhat relate). Doing something for the love of the art and having it recognized by others comes only second to being completely happy with your own work and wanting to share it. I hope these are just the early pleasant steps in a long journey of writing fulfillment for you.

Congratulations again!
** heads off to read your work **

Great article,needs more action shots next time. Sell me on how cool the characters and figures are.

_________________

I liked the Cross Country one ... had a hard time reading Ninjas due to the formatting of the site - that gray bkg

_________________

You should be an inspirational speaker. Thanks for the kindness.




I definitely failed on the photo end. One half too lazy to dig through the collection to find the ninjas, one half not very good at action photography, and one half despair when trying to pair the figures I did have with their original weapons. I honestly didn't realize how many figures would need to be photoed for the article and after writing I got overwhelmed. My next topic will be more focused hopefully and I can spend a little time getting better shots. Thank you for taking the time to read!

Thanks JM. The formatting is odd, its solid black on my phone and black with a gray boarder on my PC. I've got one more focus piece I want to write kind of like the ninja article but I want to get back to the short semi-autobiographical stuff like the Cross Country. I've always been a fan of Lewis Grizzard and Patrick McManus. If you're not familiar they wrote short magazine and newspaper articles that always related to how they were raised. My childhood can always be linked back to GI Joe or Nina Turtles, so I would like to tell some stories and how they relate to me and GI Joe. It sounds good in my head but we'll see.

_________________

Read your Cross Country write-up. Other than needing some minor edits, it was pretty good. You reminded why I liked him all those years ago, bedides being the HAVOC driver. Now I want to make a modern custom of him.

I've been there. The Field Manual tutorial we put together for Tiger Force camo patterns, we had to start lumping things together and focus on the original run with a few outliers. Otherwise it would have easily been 50 pages printed. Sometimes you just have to break things up into parts by faction or year. It can snowball quickly. In this case, the article was great. I just wanted some ninja action.

_________________

Congratulations, AVE!
I hardly read these kind of articles online, with one exception and that's Mike T's Forgotten Figures. Your article of Cross Country has similar features which I like to read: details on the sculpt, what you think of the looks, when you got it, how you played with it etc.
You've already answered it, but I'll have to echo the lack of action pics.
I'm looking forward to your next article, good luck!

Congrats on your article.

It's well-written and concise, and manages to convey a lot of information.

I feel the same about Joes from the Midwest, so it's nice to hear others have a soft spot for characters from their areas.

My only suggestion would be that the website owner pick a font color that has more contrast with the background color. It was easier to visually process it once I highlighted it.