A very long time.

Really, it's been living in my head, in various forms, since I was in about eighth grade. How long ago that was- I can't tell you. Because it makes me make the mathface. Suffice to say, a lot of the characters started existing at that point. They've grown and changed over time, and some have changed more than others. Mostly I just kind of had them in my head and waved my hands at them in vague ways. Oh, and did character design.

Fast forward to October, 2005. My husband decided to start gaming (read: playing a table-top RP) with some of his high school friends. I tagged along to hang out, because I like his friends, and because it was something to do. At that point I was aware of the existence of table-top gaming, but the closest I'd come to it was GM'ing one session of Dungeons and Dragons, about six years before this. And I had no idea what I was doing; it was really more for the sake of my friends who desperately wanted to play, and none of them wanted to GM. After watching Miles and his friends play though, I decided... hmm, that kind of looks like fun.

The next session, I had my character rolled up, an exiled Prince-cum-assassin named Leareth.

It took a very short amount of time (a couple of weeks) before I decided that I really needed more than just one day a week of gaming in my life. So, I turned to the ultimate resource for anything anytime- Teh Intarwebs! I looked into some gaming communities on livejournal, and deduced that I could create a game to be played over livejournal (play-by-post). So, I started creating it, based a little bit off the characters I'd thought up almost a decade ago, and partially off a comic book I was fiddling with at the time.

The setup was medieval, with magic, like many RP's, primarily because I majored in English, with a focus in medieval literature. Science fiction does not excite me. Superheroes, sometimes, but, it depends which Superheroes and what the focus is. (I'm particularly partial to Nightcrawler and Spiderman.)

In the process of setting up the LJ-RP, I told Kara about it, and about the world I created and the general structure, to the extent that she started asking ‘But... When can we play?' So, we did. We each designed a character, and took turns GM'ing storylines. Essentially, it functioned like writing a story alongside another person. And there was Game. And it was Good.

Then, starting in May of 2006, I had the idea, as a fluffy little ‘side story' to move all of our people into a modern high school. If only because some of them so wonderfully fit those stereotypical high school niches. As it turns out, this ‘side story' was a little more consuming than either of us expected, in that it's still going on, and developing and changing.

The comic part of things, came up purely as a whim. Kara and I had talked about doing a comic before, over a year ago, mostly in a ‘Hey, making a webcomic would be cool' kind of way. Over the course of a weekend, I doodled up some strips, and navigated through the maze of ComicGenesis forms, signing up for a space. After completing the two-week registration process, I finally had not just a backlog of comics, but a space! And that is the story of how Geek Blather came into existence.

I should add that the Saturday strips, are not based in Game, but rather, in my own real world, and the crazy things outside the internet. A lot of them are things that Miles says, or random things that I come up with, that I just think are funny. Like the word poopy.