Category: Thoughts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.