I have not, as some people might well think, been slacking off.

It’s not just the clutch of internal excuses and traps that Jay Smooth calls the little hater. It’s not just that I have very little say to my dwindling local audience that I’ve largely turned my back on, most of whom are still friends of mine and who I can pester through other Internet media all I want.

Those are the obvious reasons. There are others not everyone knows about. Here’s one. Not promising I’ll make it to part 2.

About 18 months ago, just a few months before I ended up in my current job, I was still pretending to want to write about games and the publishing thereof, so I went to what turned out to be the last showcase by Austin-based startup upstart, Gamecock Media.

They had a lot of really mediocre games to showcase, and a few awful stinkers, one of which actually looked good at the time, another that’s still in limbo, and another that was at least good enough to secure the developers a few more high-profile deals. It wasn’t much of a learning experience other than a reminder that the same tired myth that money and good times aren’t the only requirements for being an effective publisher of any entertainment media.

By the end of the year, Gamecock got bought up, but of course the process hasn’t been smooth, even though their new owners, SouthPeak Interactive, another publisher of mediocre novelty games, are doing all right these days, and one of the two Gamecock principals took his game elsewhere (and has a great notion of support.)

At the time, there didn’t seem to be that much worth writing about. And after I ended up not saying much about it, I immediately started wondering whether I was wasting my time pretending to be a journalist without any hungry desire to write stuff down about video games. Was there even a point to be having gone to the showcase?

As it turns out, there were at least two, neither of which had anything to do with me writing a thing.

One was a video interview I gave that never got published. It was by a crew at Docubloggers, which at the time was programmed out of KLRU, Austin’s PBS station. They’ve since weathered cutbacks and have struck out as an independent Web site. They’d asked me about this site, and what it takes to be a successful blogger.

Like I ever knew anything about that.

It never got published, as I learned later, because they wanted to use it as a follow-up for the next Gamecock showcase. The one that never happened.

I’ve since made friends with Domenique Bellavia and Sean Cunningham, and will at least be watching if not actively participating in their progress. If you saw my videos about ZapWizard and his Left4Dead map based on the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lake Creek, well, that was going to be one attempt. My Youtube channel continues to have mostly-unedited material (largely because I know next to nothing about video editing and haven’t got around to really learning) that I’ve otherwise enjoyed creating.

The other person I met at the Gamecock expo (they called it EIEIO, but it sounds just as ridiculous now as it did then) was Jay Lopez. And for anyone who hasn’t already heard it from me, here goes.

8-Bit Jay Lopez is going to be doing all the writing about games that I never did.

In the year following the showcase, Jay hustled up reporting jobs at newspapers near where he’s from, the on-the-way-to-South-Padre communities of Laguna Vista, Laguna Heights and Port Isabel. While he learned how to work with  deadlines and editors in the same room, he’s been writing for gaming Web sites, including a blog on GamePro Arcade (which recently shut down, but he’s still in good with GamePro editors, who recently gave him a review for their main site.) He’s got his own blog apart from everything else, and is still hustling.

Being a source of encouragement for someone like Jay, that I would not have met if not for a mutual interest in games, has been more rewarding than anything I’ve ever written on this or any other Web site. All I’ve had to do is answer IMs from someone I’ve only met in person once, telling him, yes get after that, or no don’t waste your time. He’s done all the other work.

So that’s a reason why I don’t write so much anymore. I’ve got other means of expression. At least one other person is doing the work I would do, were I more motivated to do it myself. I don’t want to feel like a big fake anymore.

There is another reason. We’ll see if I get around to writing about that.