Category: Thoughts

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Holy F**K I Wrote A Whole Book

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On Wednesday (March 13th, 2013, for those of you reading this IN THE FUTURE), I finished the first draft of my first full-length novel.

Well over 10 years ago I had an idea for a story. Being a geek, it was inspired in part by my gaming hobby. It was a fantasy story, about an artificial being called a construct – a sort of metal golem powered by a magical core. This construct had the ability to read the thoughts of other artificial beings, but an accident sort of hotwires his ability so that he begins receiving the memories of any construct in the vicinity who gets destroyed. Through the vision-memories he learns some startling truths about some very bad people, but the influx of new memories starts driving him insane.

Over time, the idea morphed a few times. At one point I had rejiggered the idea in order to submit it to an open call for novels at Wizards of the Coast, where the story was now set in the Eberron setting and the protagonist was a Warforged – that world’s version of the constructs I envisioned in my own story. I was only 23 at the time, and my writing was… rough, to say the least. My proposal did not get accepted.

Over the next few years, the idea just kept pounding around in my brain. No matter what else I did, at periodic intervals this idea would pop back up, and I’d just keep adding bits to the story. I knew that I wanted to write a series of stories centering around this character. I knew how the first book started, and I had a clear vision of how it ended. I knew the themes that I wanted to run through the book, and little tidbits I knew I wanted to include. The plot just kept banging around in my head.

At the end of 2010, I decided to try and write the first chapter. I knew so clearly how the story began, even though it had evolved quite a bit from my original idea. I sat down and banged out a 3,000 word opening chapter in about two hours, involving our hero’s entrance into the world, having woken up with no memories in a burning room, next to a dead man.

It was terrible. I’m sure part of that opinion is every artist’s pitfall of thinking their own art is all shit, but I mean it was really bad. I still have a copy of that version of the chapter, and I cringe when I read it. Even the current version – which you can read HERE, if you like – isn’t entirely finished. I can’t count the number of times I’ve rewritten that passage. I’m still not satisfied with it, but holy hell is it better than the very first version.

After writing that first chapter, I set it aside and didn’t touch it for several months. I picked it back up at random in March of 2011 and felt compelled to add to it. Over a couple of days I plunked in another 4,000 or so words, introducing the main antagonists of the story. That passage was wildly better, and has remained mostly unchanged. I still wasn’t really dedicated to working on it, so I unconsciously set it aside again.

I got a wild hair up my ass in October of 2011 and over two days dropped over 10,000 words into the manuscript. I furthered the journey, introduced a new main character, and felt like I really had something. It was another burst of energy though, and my discipline wasn’t really in place, so it sat for another few weeks without getting touched. I decided then and there that I needed to motivate myself into finishing the damned thing, which meant putting enough words into it that I felt I couldn’t just set it aside again (I was 25,000 words into another novel that I haven’t touched since 2003).

NaNoWriMo was the answer. If you don’t know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a nifty writing exercise with a website and a community that challenges writers to write a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. If you succeed, you get a certificate from the NaNoWriMo folks and a badge on their forums that identifies you as a “winner”, even though it’s not really a competition.

I didn’t really involve myself in the competition part of it, because I wasn’t really following the “rules”. I wasn’t creating a self-contained manuscript; Instead I was using the NaNoWriMo goals to add bulk to my existing novel. I set aside most everything else and proceeded to write every day in November of 2011, sticking to the running goal of 1667 words per day (which will net you just over 50k in 30 days). I didn’t quite hit 50k, but I dropped 48,000 words in that period of time, and succeeded at what I’d set out to do: I now felt entirely committed.

I mean, I now had a little under 70,000 words in the manuscript. How could I let it go now? I continued to write throughout the next several months into 2012, albeit not at quite the same pace, and then hit a wall. It wasn’t writers block so much as I’d written myself into a corner that I felt I couldn’t get out of, so the next couple of months were spent on an extensive mid-book rewrite, digging trenches and building dykes to redirect the flow of the river. It worked, but I was exhausted when I’d finished.

It almost broke me. That rewrite accomplished what I’d wanted it to, but I was amazed at the brain power it takes to rewrite my own work and still manage to maintain any sense of continuity in the prose. My life became a jumble of sticky notes and notepads and random scraps of paper where I’d jotted down the plot points I’d changed and tried to figure out their downstream effects. A lot was changing – including killing off a character I hadn’t intended to before – and keeping it all straight was daunting.

When I finished, I just… stopped. I wasn’t actively trying to not write, but I just, well, didn’t write for several months. It took some outside forces – namely a number of friends constantly asking me how I was doing on my book – to get me to bust my ass back into it.

Toward the end of 2012 I lit a fire under my own ass to finish the damned thing. I’d originally set the goal of finishing it by the end of that year, but didn’t quite make it. This time, though, it wasn’t because I wasn’t writing, it was because I kept seeing holes I needed to close before the end, which kept adding length to the overall manuscript. I quit my job at the beginning of 2013 to finish it and spent the entire month of February – a month loaded with distractions – writing.

It took longer than I expected. From first keystrokes to last, I spent roughly 27 months on the first draft. If I actually calculate real writing time, though, I’d say the book probably took about 10 months of real work to complete.

At this point I could be humble or self deprecating, but fuck that it’s not who I am. I FINISHED MY BOOK. And I’m proud of myself for it. It’s going to take a cubic-fuck-ton of editing and rewrites to shape it into what I want it to be, and I know I’ve got a long road ahead to get it published, but HOLY SHIT IT’S FINISHED.

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The Best Laid Plans

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My goal for the month of February was to finish the first draft of my novel and to write one blog post every day. These goals have taught me one very important lesson: Set realistic goals.

I’ve missed the one-blog-post-per-day mark already. I’m not horrified by that, but I am a little surprised. I’m likely going to miss the finish-the-book goal, which I actually knew the moment I started writing on it earlier this month. As it turns out, there were two things working against me in February:

First, the novel is going to be a little longer than I expected. I was thinking the first draft would cap out at around 120,000 words, but I’ve already surpassed that and still have a ways to go. I’m now expecting it to clock in at around 140k. I’m not at all bothered by missing this goal, because I don’t believe I’m missing it as a result of laziness or complacency.

It’s amazing the unexpected things that pop into your writing when constructing fiction. I have a plan for how this novel ends, and I had most of a plan constructed for how to get there. As I wrote, I saw holes; parts that needed filling-in not so that the ending would make sense, but so that how the characters got there would make sense. The last bit of manuscript before the novel’s climax needed some additional info, else it was going to be a jumbled mess.

Hell, it probably still is, but that’s where I stand with it.

Second, the month was filled with holidays and things that required preparation that I had not previously accounted for. The first half of the month was spent adjusting to my new environment and learning how to develop a self-driven work ethic. The second half of the month contains Valentine’s Day, my 35th Birthday, and the Geekerific.com presence at Emerald City Comicon, all of which required my attention and interfered with writing. Not to mention the fact that in the middle of it all, I got deathly sick for about a week.

My original goals did not take into account my personal adjustment period, but overall they did not account for outside forces. I assumed – yeah, yeah, it makes an ass out of Umed… or something – that I would just be able to devote every waking moment to those two goals. In my excitement for that idea, I failed at the whole, you know, reality thing. Hell, I missed my blog post yesterday because I churned out almost 2,300 words on the book. You know, priorities and stuff.

And you know what? It doesn’t really bother me. The last three weeks has taught me so much about my writing process that it’s worth the effort even if I didn’t technically “finish” my goals. I’ve finally entered the climactic conflict in the novel, and I’ve gained insight on the types of things I wand to talk about in my blog. Oddly enough, where I’ve gained confidence in my fiction writing, I’ve eroded my confidence in my blogging after reading a ton of other blogs that are both better informed, more interesting, and way more eloquent than I am.

But I’m still gonna do it, whether you people want to read it or not.

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PS4: Initial Thoughts

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If you’re not a gamer, or if you’re some sort of reclusive hobbit gamer that lives in an abandoned missile silo, the news of today’s Playstation press conference may have passed you by. For the rest of us, this was the first shell fired into the newest generation of warring consoles, where Sony spent the better part of two hours announcing their plans for the upcoming Playstation 4.

Anyone who listens to the After The Fact podcast knows that I’m a humongous Playstation fan. I grew up a console gamer and cut my teeth on Nintendo’s classic systems. I was just the right age – a senior in high-school – when the Playstation came out, and it was the first console I ever bought with my own money. I was a mild Playstation fan through the life of the PSOne, mostly because I was wholly disappointed by Nintendo’s offering at the time. When the PS2 came out, though, I was completely hooked, and have been ever since.

Today’s PS4 announcement had a hell of a lot of good in it. It seems, for the most part, that Sony has learned from many of their mistakes during the PS3 generation, and is focused on providing a wholly reinvented online and social experience, combined with a system that is focused on getting you gaming as fast as possible and as soon as you want it.

My only real disappointments with today’s conference came in the form of the games that were showcased. A few really caught my eye like inFamous: Second Son and Knack, but the rest kind of fell flat for me. Killzone looked beautiful but it’s a series that’s never found it’s way into my heart. I’m glad to see that Watch Dogs is a PS4 offering rather than PS3, but the gameplay demo they showed actually didn’t feel as dynamic as the one Ubisoft showed us at E3. The Destiny announcement was a given – especially after their conference in Seattle just a couple of days ago – and the Diablo III announcement left me scratching my head.

The two biggest standouts in my mind, though, are the PSVita connectivity – remote play that might, for once, actually work? – and the controller. The DualShock 4 is the first departure from the standard DualShock design since its introduction in the mid-’90’s, and it looks nigh on perfect to me. A more ergonomic shape, added features, and just slightly re-designed everything means a DualShock that seems like it’s just better.

I’m still processing everything I saw today, and I’ll have more detailed thoughts in the coming week.

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We Survived V-Day

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Look at that. We all lived through Valentine’s Day.

According to a ton of people in my social media feeds, Valentine’s Day sits in a range somewhere between “annoying corporate holiday” and “candy heart murder-suicide pact day”. V-Day has always carried a stigma for the average adult male: it’s either the day you go try to get laid or the day you fuck everything up and will never get laid again. Somewhere along the line, though, it became this hated thing, perceived not as a day to celebrate love but a day for those in relationships to throw their connectedness in the face of all of their untethered friends.

I’ll admit: Valentine’s day is pretty superfluous. If you’re in even a semi-committed relationship, you don’t need a holiday – or any outside force, for that matter – to reinforce that bond. Well, you shouldn’t, at least. Your relationship with your significant other is a very personal thing, and isn’t something that most people (at least that I know) need or want to celebrate on an international level. We want our celebrations to be just for us – the times that our relationship not only takes precedence over the rest of the world, but does so to the exclusion of all others.

So, yeah. Valentine’s Day is somewhat artificial. But when did it become the target of vitriol? When I was growing up there was always some bitter sap on the sidelines with their fuck-this-lovey-dovey-crap attitude, but somehow this cheesy, unimportant holiday has become THE ESTABLISHMENT, and single people turn into a raging anti-establishment mob for a few days.

I’ll let all you single people know a little secret about Valentine’s Day: most of us in relationships don’t give a shit about it. Yeah, we’ll use it as a random excuse to buy flowers or go out to a movie or have a date night – all things that we do in plenty of other situations – but it’s not us that’s throwing anything in anyone’s face. Truly committed, happy couples think that Valentine’s Day is pretty silly and arbitrary, just like you single folk do.

The percentage of people who go googly over this holiday is (almost certainly) pretty (probably) small (hopefully). The real pressure of Valentine’s Day lands squarely on the shoulders of newly-committed guys whose relationships haven’t developed enough to have their own milestones, and thus V-Day becomes girlfriends’ litmus test for their boyfriends’ devotion. And let me tell ya: that is a shitty place to be.

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Nintendo Nostalgia

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nintendo_desk
See that desk right there? That’s where I spent my last two and a half years with Nintendo of America. That picture shows it on my very last day, after I’d already packed it up and was headed out the door, so that’s probably the cleanest that desk has been since it was empty.

I found myself feeling nostalgic about my job there yesterday – something I wouldn’t have expected for at least another few weeks. The feelings were triggered by a conversation I was having with some old co-workers at lunch. When the conversation invariably turned to matters of Nintendo, I found myself referring to the place as “we” and “our”, and forcibly corrected to say “them” and “theirs”.

This didn’t come as a surprise. I know that it will probably take months – if not years – for me to stop referring to Nintendo in the first person. What surprised me is how much that moment made me miss my job and my former co-workers. The job itself was pretty standard corporate fare, except that I was working with indie developers on a day-to-day basis which I really enjoyed. Working for Nintendo is really no different than working for any other large corporation, with one major exception: The people.

Most of the people I worked with were geeks, just like me, even (and maybe especially) my boss. That’s what made the job unique, was that I actually had something in common with the people there, which I know I wouldn’t if I worked at any other random corporation. I could talk to my co-workers about comic books or board games or sci-fi, and man could we talk about video games. I spent every day surrounded by people with whom I have now developed (hopefully) lasting friendships because we had so much in common, rather than just a conglomeration of random people with whom I had nothing to talk about.

I might be able to replace the day to day duties with creative projects, and I might not miss my specific job (or what it was morphing into), but damn I’m going to miss the people there. Bye, Nintendo.
nintendo_exterior

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My First Week Of Un(SELF)employment

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In the last week, I’ve posted to my blog about how hard self motivation is, and how poker has taught me discipline in many areas of my life. Over the course of that same week, I’ve proven one point (the former), and completely shot the other (the latter) to hell.

Self-motivation is tempered – or eviscerated – by distraction, but it’s even worse when there doesn’t feel like there are enough hours in the day to complete the tasks set before oneself. I’m not yet understanding how I can eliminate a job that took up 10 to 15 hours of my day and only add an hour or so of blogging to my plate, and yet still feel like I’m short on time every day I’m home. Couple that with a decent, if not robust, social life and now the demands on my time are oddly overwhelming.

Yeah, yeah, priorties, blah, blah sacrifice, neh. I get it. I’m not posting this to complain, it’s merely an observation. My brain knows what I’m supposed to do, but developing the understanding of how to do it will take a little more effort than I thought. I have two goals for the month of February: finish the first draft of my novel and write one blog post per day. Both are goals I’m going to complete, but this weekend proved a significant obstacle when I didn’t write anything on the novel for three days, and I’ve so far missed two blog posts.

On top of all of that, I still haven’t had a chance to engage in anything really leisurely outside of the planned events of the weekend. Everyone that I worked with said how jealous they were that I’d just get to play video games all day. The thought always brought a smile to my face, because it’s something I’ve never been able to do. That smile is still on my face, because oh what a fantasy that thought is.

No matter how much time we seem to have available to us, we always seem to fill it. When I had a full time job, I still managed to maintain a website, produce two podcasts, and write (somewhat) consistently, as well as maintaining a regular poker game, gaming with friends, and playing video games. Quitting my job was the bomb-blast that shattered the structure into which I’ve molded my life for the last nine years, scattering all of my responsibilities to the four winds. It’s time for me to reign them in.

I promise, with only a couple of crossed fingers, that this will be the last observation I post about my time-management skills. It just happens to be a topic in the forefront of my mind.

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My Journey With Poker

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I completely missed my blog post yesterday. I’ll see what I can do about getting two out today, but I make no claims or promises.

Yesterday my house was a mess, and I had people coming over for my weekly poker game. It may seem like a trivial thing to prioritize over my book or my blog, but poker is an extremely important part of my life, and one that I treat with a lot of respect. I try to make my poker room the best environment for the game as possible because I take pride in the fact that people enjoy playing at my place, which is what took up the time that I should have spent writing.

I know a lot of people see poker as nothing more than gambling. That’s unfortunate because, while it has an element of risk to it, the amount of skill involved in poker can far outweigh the luck. That’s an argument I could spend an entire blog post making, but I’m going to set that aside right now so I can talk about the topic of today’s post: the effect poker has had on my life.

Many years ago, I had a temper problem. A pretty bad one. Not to the degree of being violent toward other people (at least not physically), but mostly toward inanimate objects. Trivial things would get under my skin, and send me flying off the handle at the dumbest times. My previous relationship (prior to my marriage) exacerbated that situation ten-fold, because my ex-girlfriend knew exactly what buttons to push to set me off, and kept her thumbs firmly planted on them. There were a number of emergency door replacements and strategically placed pictures in our old apartment in the aftermath of my frustration.

Unfortunately, this trend continued even after I was in a wildly better relationship. Rather than identify the problem and work on setting it aside, I had reoriented my mindset around what was acceptable for me to destroy – a place no human thought process should ever go, mind you – so I was no longer punching holes in doors, but frequently breaking things that I owned or, in one case, bending the shit out of the steering wheel of my car.

In 2004, I was introduced to poker. A friend of mine who had been into the game for quite some time taught me how to play at a 4th of July picnic that year and, being a pretty hardcore gamer all of my life, I took to it immediately. I had a decent eye for the strategy of the game, but it would be quite a while before I developed the temperament for it.

My first few years as a player my temper translated right into my play, and I was a complete tiltbox. I had spent an inordinate amount of time learning the intricacies of poker strategy, but one bad beat would throw it all out the window and send me spiraling into a spitting, cursing oblivion. One night, about a year after I started playing, I was heads up with the guy who ran our weekly poker night. To say that this guy was bad at poker would be like me writing an entire blog post explaining the reasons why humans should breathe. You know, air. This heads up match lasted almost an hour and a half (a long time with our structure back then), and on eight separate occasions I had him all-in and had the best hand, and all eight times he sucked out on me and put me out in second place.

My brain exploded. There are very few times in my life that I’ve ever been so angry about something so insignificant. I came very close to flipping his poker table over, and stormed out of his house, slamming his door behind me so hard I almost knocked his entryway windows out of their frames. And that was only the beginning of a tirade that lasted the rest of the night.

It was that night – coupled with a very serious conversation with my wife the next day – that honestly changed my life forever. What I didn’t explain earlier was that my temper, having been ignited by my ex-girlfriend, should have been extinguished – or at least dampened – once that relationship was over. I can very specifically trace my temper issues back to that one woman (mixed with a high volume of my own immaturity), but once she was out of my life, I either couldn’t or simply didn’t work on a way to bring it into check.

And I came closer than ever to losing my wife because of it.

That night was the trigger for an interesting type of soul-searching mission. I was desperately trying to find a way to get my temper in check without the use of drugs or a therapist. So I buried myself in poker.

Does that sound odd? It shouldn’t. The disciplines involved in being a good poker player include strategy, odds, reading players, and understanding your place at the table. Underpinning all of that, though, is self-discipline. The most important aspects of being a great poker player are not rooted in understanding the mechanics of the game, but instead understanding yourself and being able to remain in control at all times.

During this delve into the game, I read more poker books than I can count. I studied strategy on online sites, talked poker with friends constantly, and was playing some form of poker literally every single day of my life. If I wasn’t playing a home game, I was making trips to a local card room or playing online. And during this entire process I was learning two very important skills: how to objectively identify flaws in my own gameplay (including strategic errors AND mental and emotional lapses), and how to control my emotions.

Poker is a roller coaster of a game. Playing against terrible players is the best way to make money, but it’s also the most frustrating thing in the world. Bad players spend most of their time making the wrong moves, but that little bit of luck sometimes brings them out on top. You can do everything right, and still get screwed for it. In the long run it all evens out, but in the moment it’s fuck-all aggravating. The good players – the truly good players – are the ones who can let it slide off their back and not affect their play.

I’ve played against a lot of bad players. At that time, when I was playing daily, it was pretty much constant. There is no better immersion course in emotional control than playing $10 sit-and-go’s online, or sitting down at a $2/$4 table at a shitty local cardroom. Over the next year, I focused so hard on learning how to not let bad beats and crappy suck-outs affect my game, that I was simultaneously teaching myself how to let other things roll off my back, and keep my emotions check away from the poker table. And it wasn’t always a conscious effort. Sometimes I’d find myself starting to get frustrated by something, and feel myself putting it aside and telling myself not to let it bother me, and it was only in a moment of clarity that I identified what I was doing and where it had come from.

Never in my life have I found a better lesson in prioritizing the things that affect me on a day-to-day basis. Learning how to set aside stupidity I could not control in a poker game shined a spotlight on all of the things that I was letting under my skin outside the game, and taught me how to diminish their importance and learn what truly mattered. In the process, I was also learning how to identify my own faults and determine courses of action to fix them – starting with my temper.

It took a long, long time. Years, in fact. Along the way, I made some pretty big mistakes. Unlike the years before, though, I knew now how to see those mistakes for what they were, and admit to myself that a solution was needed. Admitting my faults to myself allowed me also to admit them out loud, which went a long way in saving quite a few of my friendships. And all along, I was chipping away at the foundations of my shitty temper until it finally fell away.

I’m not perfect; I still get pissed off about things. Only now, it usually doesn’t last very long, and it slides out of my consciousness rather quickly. For me, anger was a destructive force that cost me friends and almost destroyed my marriage. The disciplines I’ve learned from playing poker – both strategic and emotional – have translated into almost every aspect of my everyday life. Every skill I’ve taken away from poker has had a quantifiable impact on my life, but none so significant as allowing me to live without having childish temper tantrums.

It may sound sappy or cliche, but poker saved my marriage, and changed my life.

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On Self Motivation

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I’ve been “unemployed” for 2 1/2 days, officially. I’m already seeing issues with my self-motivation in the face of distraction and multiple tasks.

We built up our new house to be a place we felt like we’d never need to leave. In anticipation of a significant drop in income, we filled our house with toys while we still had the money to do so. We were already gamers, so we had the PS3’s (yeah, multiple). My wife and I both have 3DS’s, and I have a PSVita. We’ve got iPads and Kindles. We have four classic arcade cabinets in the house, and a pool table. We’ve got shelves full D&D books and a giant bookshelf loaded with board and card games, and a beautiful Geek Chic gaming table to go along with it. There are comic books and regular books. There’s even a poker room.

This house is one giant fucking distraction.

Couple that with the sudden lack of external motivation, and I’ve got a bit of a problem on my hands. I have a book to finish. A blog to maintain. Two podcasts to produce. A comic book script, two short stories, and a couple of game designs in the works.

And yet, Ni No Kuni caaaaalllllsss toooooo meeeeeeee…

This is an interesting shift in mentality that I haven’t really dealt with before, at least not to this extreme. I’ve spent most of my life with external stimuli from school or work setting me on task. Sitting in a cubicle with the looming threat of being fired over your head is a simple way to make sure you stay focused (most of the time). Without that motivation, I’m forced to pull from inside to make shit happen.

Some people might think that’s easy enough. I mean, my wife may very well strangle me in my sleep if I quit my job just to fuck off on the internet all day, right? I wish it were that simple.

See, my brain is still in “WOOHOO!!” mode. I wake up in the morning and FUCK YEAH I DON’T HAVE TO GO TO WORK AND I CAN PLAY ALL THE SLY COOPER 4 I WANT AND THEN READ COMICS AND SURF TWITTER AND shut the hell up, brain. I’m still trying to figure out what kind of stimulus I need to bury that thought process and get back into wake-up-sit-at-desk-do-work mode, because damn I have a lot of work to do.

And yeah, it is definitely work. Sitting at a computer for several hours writing isn’t an easy task, especially writing fiction. These blog posts are straightforward because they’re my stream of consciousness; my thought process pushed to the keyboard in real time. Fiction requires invention. I’m creating a world from whole cloth and populating it with people that no one but me has ever met, and after a few hours of writing I’m actually pretty drained.

Trying to finish this book is one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to accomplish. Although I loved my job, it wasn’t very challenging. I knew the tasks at hand by rote and was very good at what I did. All of that knowledge is useless to me now, though, and I need to push it aside and make room in my mind for the stories I want to tell. I need to convince the subconscious part of me that has held onto all of that “work knowledge” for so long that it’s no longer important, and that there’s a new sheriff in town.

Amongst all of that, Persona 4 Golden is singing it’s sweet, lilting siren song from the table in the other room, and the new issue of Colder is waiting for me at my comic shop. Never in my life have I needed to kill the procrastinator in me more than I do right now.

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A Post A Day?

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Here’s where I try it. I’m going to put this out there:

I’m going to write a new blog post every day.

It might be shit. I could spend half an hour to an hour a day vomiting useless crap into this blog until it’s filled with the sort of trite garbage that the internets will eventually call the reason for society’s downfall. Or, I could put something profound into the world that, upon reading, genuinely changes the course of just one person’s life.

It’ll likely be the former.

But, I’m going to do it anyway. I am a writer, after all. At least, that’s what I call myself now to keep from curling up in a heap in the corner, sucking my thumb, and weeping over my terrible decisions. The posts in my blog will, as most blogs do, run toward my interests. You’ll see updates about my novel or other stories I’m writing, one of the traditional game designs I’m working on, or any of my wide and varied geek interests: traditional gaming (board/card/role-playing), video games, comic books, movies, sci-fi & fantasy books, etc., etc. I also enjoy reviewing things, so sometimes you’ll see more “official” style reviews of the things I mention above. Sometimes, you might just see my stream of consciousness played out in words.

To add a bit of purpose to this particular post, I’ll let you all know what I’m up to this month: I’ve made it a goal to finish the first draft of my first novel by the end of February. I’m in the final stages of the final act, so it shouldn’t take a hell of a lot more, but the ending is proving harder for me to construct than I originally though. As I write, I’ll be posting updates here as well as word-count updates on Twitter (where you should follow me @GeekElite).

My second goal for February is to keep up the daily blog posts. Hopefully the things I write here will be interesting, and I’ll try not to make them as long as the dissertation from yesterday. If you enjoy the things I say, feel free to drop me a line via Twitter or leave comments on my blog. I can’t guarantee that I’ll answer you, but I’ll try when I have time.

Thanks for listening. Uh… reading.

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Lifey Life, And Changes Thereof

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Last week, I finally followed through on the largest single life decision since my marriage: I quit my job.

For the last 9 years I’ve worked in varying capacities at Nintendo of America, a place I somehow simultaneously loved with all of my heart and hated to the core of my soul. There was never any middle ground with me and Nintendo – it was never just “meh” to me.

The job came to me at a time in my life when I really had no idea where I was headed or where I even wanted to be headed. In 1998 I had received a degree in Computer Animation which I promptly forgot about when I scored an internship-turned-job at Wizards of the Coast. This was a huge coup for me at age 20, since I was (am, have always been) a humongous geek and loved almost everything Wizards made.

Over my four years at WotC, I went from an internship in their fledgling (and ultimately defunct) Digital Media department to answering rules questions for befuddled Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons players to ultimately running their internal games library, playtesting M:TG sets, and doing any number of catch-all tasks within their R&D department. I loved my time at Wizards and, even to this day, can say that it was the best job (or set of jobs) I’ve ever had. Which is why it made me not just ignore, but practically erase from my memory my time in college and the degree that it generated.

When I was laid off from WotC at age 24, I was devastated. I had semi-consciously decided, in my early twenties, to shift the focus of my life away from the degree that had burned me out on animating while dumping me into an animation world that had a glut of unemployed talent and onto a burgeoning career at a company that I (mostly) loved and made products that I could really get behind. Even Pokemon. This was the third round of layoffs WotC had ever engaged in so, while more frequent than perhaps necessary, the WotC layoff routine had not yet become a joke worthy of immortalizing in Dork Tower.

For the next year I was basically unemployed. I got a small paycheck doing ultimately mediocre freelance layout work on a controversial D20 RPG supplement called The Book of Erotic Fantasy, did a few other very minor freelance jobs, and collected state unemployment. When that ran out, I did a few boring temp jobs at small companies and Microsoft. Blech.

At this point in my life I was completely directionless. I was lucky enough to have a wife with a steady income (she also worked at WotC and had managed to survive the layoffs) so we weren’t out on the street, but that year of unemployment was rougher on both of us than we could’ve thought. So, after the last stint as a temp at the big M, I took up my friend’s offer to join up with the big N.

As it turned out, getting help to get into Nintendo wasn’t entirely necessary. Their testing department did – and still does – generally have a waiting list of several hundred eager gaming newbs, all waiting in the wings of one of Nintendo’s several temp agencies for the standard ramp-up to test the holiday game releases. I got in fairly easily, found that I had an aptitude for breaking shit, and I was off to the races.

At first, my intention was to use this as a stop-gap solution until I figured “things” out. I’m sure, at some point in everyone’s life, we’ve worked a job that was “just for the income until I get my acting/writing/drawing/prostitution/meth-ring off the ground”, and that’s all Nintendo was. The problem was that I lacked the motivation to figure out exactly what the fuck I was supposed to be doing at home when I wasn’t working. In all honesty, it was just nice to have steady income again, right up until the point WotC laid off my wife.

Well, shit.

For the next year, it was my wife’s turn to float. She had temp jobs here and there, worked for a startup for a while but didn’t really jive with whatever vision they had, and eventually landed at Amazon. For a while we were both technically temps, but we were steady temps. When she got hired full-time, I did a little dance of joy. My brain, however, had switched gears from “let’s get this creative shit going” to “how can I get hired and thus increase our income?”. My path at Nintendo was unintentionally set.

Four years. I spent four years as a temp at Nintendo, well longer than any human being should live in self-imposed pseudo-stability. Every 10 months I’d be forced to take a three-month break due to Washington’s temp hiring laws, and I’d squander the time off by screwing around rather than putting my efforts toward anything creative or useful. Then, I’d go back to Nintendo and settle right back into the routine.

In 2005, the worst possible thing for my creative juices happened: I got a job that was WAY worse than temping at Nintendo. During one of my mandatory breaks, my temp agency placed me into a customer service position at Cingular, who had only just acquired AT&T Wireless. I spent five full weeks in training and was (luckily) placed in their business services division, doing tech support for Cingular’s corporate account billing software.

If it sounds terrible, that’s because it was. Not only was I supporting billing for large-scale corporate accounts, the things I was supporting didn’t work right. Simultaneous backend and software upgrades caused their systems to shit the bed, and I was receiving angry calls from corporate accounts who were reporting $75,000 discrepancies in their bills. (Yes, that’s a comma, and yes, that’s the right number of zeroes.) I woke up every morning dreading my job, and left work every evening pissed off and stressed out. I hung on long enough for them to offer me a full time position, and laughed in their faces when they offered me $7 an hour lower than industry standard, and only $1 an hour more than I was making testing games at Nintendo.

How, you may be asking, was this bad for my creative side? It showed me how bad things could be, and at the time my only barometer for comparison was game testing at Nintendo. So, I went back there, and started pouring my efforts into applying for permanent positions and increasing my income rather than using it as I had originally intended – throw away work while I did creative things on the side.

The next year was rough on my psyche. I had applied for and failed to get four different positions at Nintendo, and was at my wits end. I was on the verge of quitting in disgust when a friend in another department talked me into changing jobs, and I moved from doing debug testing (breaking games and reporting bugs) to Lotcheck testing (certification of finished games prior to pressing). This was either the best or worst thing that could have happened to me – I can’t quite tell which just yet; I’ll need another couple of years of hindsight – because it drove me forward and forced me to parlay that change into a full-time position in only 6 months. LEVELED THE FUCK UP. Now, my wife had a full time job at Amazon, I was a perm a Nintendo, we both had benefits, and we were making more money than we’d ever seen before. It took a good two years before the luster of that started flaking off.

See, the creative side of me was creeping back in. I had started designing a couple of games and randomly begun writing a book. I had started a new website and created a podcast (eventually I’d be hosting two), and it was re-introducing me to what it felt like to birth an idea into the world rather than simply execute on someone else’s. It made me start to question some of the bullshit I was putting up with at my job, and I began to see the greener grass. Unfortunately, my brain was still in need-income-or-world-implodes panic mode, so I couldn’t figure out a way to break free.

I decided that the best thing would be a change of scenery. Maybe that would refresh my senses and put me in a position to look at my work/life balance – which was severely fucked at this stage – with fresh eyes. I began applying for internal positions outside my department again. At the same time, my current work situation just kept getting worse. Between arguments with my boss, changes in my responsibilities (read: stripping me of responsibilities), and some of the dumbest departmental decision-making I’d seen at the company yet, I was reaching my last straw.

It was PAX 2010 where, yet again, the thing that happened was either the best or worst thing for me. On Saturday afternoon my wife and I were sitting down to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory across from the Seattle Convention Center. I had wandered the show floor all of Friday and part of Saturday. I had recorded a podcast Friday evening talking about all the cool things I’d seen, and I realized that I needed to start creating something. I had reached a point where I not only hated, but resented my job.

In a moment of the most amazing timing in my life – seriously, if I made this up I don’t think you’d believe me – I was in the midst of telling my wife that if I didn’t get the job I was applying for at Nintendo, I was going to just quit outright. Just as she was starting to respond, my phone rang, and they offered me the new position. The waves of relief with which I was overcome washed away most of my coherent thought about my creative efforts. Luckily, this time, they found something to hold onto.

Over the course of two and a half years at my new job, it carried an entirely different form of frustration with it. In my previous position, my frustrations were personal – low level decisions that were directly impacting my job and my work environment. I absolutely loved my new job – and continued to the entire time I was in it – but then watched the corporation around me make so many higher-level decisions that I felt were either ill-informed or downright stupid.

As a long-time hard core gamer, that was hard for me to watch. I’ve been a Nintendo fan since the early ’80’s, and have been playing their games most of my life. As a gamer, I love Nintendo franchises. Some of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had have been at the hands of Nintendo. So, seeing them make boneheaded decisions – and not necessarily the ones the public sees – actually hurt. Over my time there, I found it increasingly difficult to divorce my love of Nintendo as a gaming franchise from my job at the Nintendo corporate office, and that frustration started creeping back in.

This time, however, that little creative spark had grown to a flame, and my wife and I had been discussing me quitting for a while. This wasn’t specifically related to my job, at all – like I said, I really loved it – but we were finally at a point in our lives where we could absorb some of the risk involved. We didn’t have kids, we had bought a house and our payments were awesome, her job was getting better and her income was enough that we could afford to take the hit.

So I quit. And it’s turned out to be one of the best decisions of my entire life. After I put in notice (and I gave four weeks so as to screw my co-workers as little as possible), I felt… changed. I was expecting to be stressed and nervous, and to have to force myself to push through those feeling in order to get on with my goals. Instead, I had a perpetual stupid grin on my face, and I was walking around in practically a euphoric haze.

Rarely in my life have my decisions come with so little apprehension. This was one of the biggest decisions of my life, and it was accompanied by almost no doubt. Today, I figured out why: It’s the first time since being laid off from Wizards where any decision about my career was grounded in a decisive direction. The decision came with a plan, and a forward-thinking idea. So many of my career moves over the last 10 years have been based either on unexpected upheaval or the desire to exit my current situation rather than enter into a new one. I made this decision knowing full well that I loved my job and could continue to enjoy it, but that it wasn’t right for me.

So now, we’ll see where it leads. My wife has been unnaturally supportive, as have all of my friends. I know plenty of creative people who have been telling me for a while that when you make decisions based on your happiness, good things happen, but I haven’t really believed them until now. Of course, I only left my job on Friday, so I don’t really know if good things are coming or not.

But it sure as hell feels like they are.