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Two posts in one day. I must be a madman.

Okay, I can take the wraps off some news.

I got the greenlight this afternoon that I will be the co-creator and contributing writer to a video game blog for the newspaper where I work.

It's been something that's been in the works for about two months, mostly in the "hey, you know what would be a good idea" mode of a couple guys just sitting around and b.s.-ing each other about trying to figure out how to have fun on company time. After we stopped laughing and thought about it, having us write about the video game industry as both players and cub reporters started to make sense. Too much sense. My new partner had been writing small game reviews for a year before we came up with this idea. Yours truly had been scanning the Web, dropping gossip and news to my cohort. Over time, our interest grew from "That game was awesome. Especially that one part with the chain saw and the flaming kitten" to "Man, I wonder if Nintendo's new handheld means the end of the Game Boy, and what's going to happen to Sony's handheld after Wal-Mart and several Hollywood studios just rejected the UMD format." In short, we schooled ourselves in PR speak, in reading quarterly reports, in sifting through the manic, juvenile postings of gaming fanboys to decipher the streetsense of what was working in the marketplace. We have been watched over by one of our business writers...he a sensei or our young grasshopper. After we rode as virtual wingmen to his E3 coverage, something tapped us on the shoulder, whispering tones of graduation to the next level. A week ago, my cohort and I looked at each other and said, "so, when do we start this thing?" It was a question of benign frustration. We were getting aggressive, and with a change in the management, we struck when our new boss was disoriented enough to say "Sure, fine" in that parental tone of "I don't care what you do, just don't burn the garage down."

We hope to get everything up and running in a week or two, just in time for coverage of a video game exhibit coming to a major Seattle museum. I'll let you know about it when I know something.

My mom asked if I would be getting paid extra for this. And after a second, I realized I wasn't. At least I was still proud of me. I'll be doing something more than data entry. I have no idea where this is going to go, but it's that whole "writing about what you love" thing. Can't be all bad.

So, there you go.