The Dream Job

Last Friday, March 30th, I accepted an offer for the job of my dreams. This past Tuesday, April 3rd, I declined the position.

Forgive me for not naming names, but this isn’t the studio’s story. This is mine. But, really, this is a love story.

I stumbled into my career. I write because it’s all I really know how to do. Sure, I can run a publishing company (and have). I deal with the paperwork and printing and accounting and all that because I love the writing. I love stories. I’ve dedicated my time to learning how stories work, the different formats, how to develop characters, the role of plot, perspective, trust, honesty, emotion. I’m no master here; I’m a student of story. But I’m a constant student.

Twelve years ago, I was a DSL tech. I worked in a big Houston-as-in-NASA-looking control room with giant monitors on the front wall and everyone seated before consoles. Lots of IP addresses (as in “internet protocol”) and very serious phone calls with very serious clients who needed reliable high-speed solutions for various very serious reasons. Year before that, I was a dial-up customer service rep helping folks set up their new iMacs to dial into a 56k connection. I’d return to that work from 2003-2004. In between, I was a copyeditor at a legal publishing house, poring over environmental legislation summaries for comma splices and outdated text references

During that whole time, I published books. First, a poetry book back in 1999 and then my first game, Little Fears, in 2001. During my second stint as your friendly customer service representative, I wrote and published my second game Wyrd is Bond. It wasn’t until 2004 that I became very serious about writing and designing, and that was also the year I accepted the position of Adventure Game Director at Human Head Studios, overseeing their development of pen-and-paper IP (as in “intellectual property”) testing grounds.

While there, I helped polish the script for their first-person shooter Prey. After the Adventure Game Division closed, I stuck around to help out where I could. I left Head to join Big Rooster as a game designer in 2007. I continued along that route for years, picking up video game story development and writing jobs. I even got credited for some of them, along with an award nomination, and landed back at Head to work on Prey 2 last summer. Intermixed with this, I released a new edition of Little Fears and am prepping my fourth game line Streets of Bedlam.

I stumbled into my career. I wrote some stuff people liked, made some good friends who have my back, and tried to do everything with integrity and honesty.

But I would never have been able to do any of it without the love, support, and belief of my wife.

My wife is far more practical than I am. She studied hard all through school; I started slacking off around 8th Grade. She came from far more modest means than I did, and this instilled a drive in her that I’ve never seen in anyone else. I was a dreamer; she didn’t have time to dream. She spent her Senior Year of high school taking college courses to get a headstart on her adult life.

She worked two jobs during this time. Always had her nose in a book, was always preparing for one class or another. She graduated high school with honors. She had a ribbon around her neck when she got her Associate’s Degree in Nursing two years later.

Nurses were in demand and made good money. This was a career where she could excel, build a nest egg. It was practical.

While I stumbled from job to job, talking big talk of my aspirations and dreams, she worked thirteen-hour swing shifts. She pushed forward, doing what she always does: becomes the best at whatever task is given to her.

She’s been doing this for fourteen years. She’s won awards for her skills, received recognition from a lot of higher-ups, earned the respect of coworkers and patients.

Throughout all of this, her face pointed forward, she supported my dreams.

When I got the email saying I got the job at Head back in 2004, she uprooted her life and moved 600 miles away from her family to land in Madison, Wisconsin. It was hard but she did it. Because she believed in me. She knew I had a dream.

She worked harder than anyone to keep our family afloat when my dreams jumped tracks or smashed into walls. While I swung from saving grace to saving grace, sometimes with almost a year in between, she brought home a paycheck every two weeks.

She recently decided to return to school to get her Baccalaureate. She needed it to go even farther along her career path. So she works her thirteen-hour days and stays up too late writing papers and reading articles. This pragmatic wife of mine—this serious-minded, hard-working soul—was starting to dream. I could see it in her eyes. She had big ideas, big plans, and was making the effort to realize a life beyond the practical.

Now, I want to work. I take the jobs I can, I write my books and stories, and I keep pressing forward. Recently, more than any other time, my efforts were paying off. Folks were starting to take notice. I was making headway.

And then, one day, seemingly out of the blue, I got an email. From a MAJOR VIDEO GAME STUDIO. The kind of studio whose games grace magazine covers every month. The kind of studio with four titles-even-your-grandmother-has-heard-of in development right now. They had a position they needed to fill, on one of their AAA console games. The position was HEAD STORY GUY.

HEAD STORY GUY. MAJOR VIDEO GAME STUDIO. AAA TITLE.

MY DREAM JOB.

I mean, I’d worked with some great companies in the past, on some really cool games, but we were talking a budget and a level of exposure that is nigh-mythical.

I thought for a moment they had the wrong guy.

But they didn’t. One of their long-time folks recommended me for the position. They wanted to talk.

So we talked. And it went well. I was excited; they were excited. Three weeks later, I had an offer. A good one.

I got the job.

I got my dream job.

Thing is, this job was in another country. And it required relocation.

Of course, the developer in question was old hat at relocation. They had it down to a science. But the wife and I had a lot of questions. Could I ensure our children had a chance to prosper, to continue their education in English while learning the local language? Could we sell our house in this market? Could we bring our pets? Our cars?

We went through the list, checking off each item. We researched online, made phone calls. We got our answers. They were (mostly) good ones.

Could my wife continue to practice nursing if we relocated?

And there was the sticky part.

The new place had lots of fiddly rules. And contradictory information. The developer’s relocation team told me one thing seemingly from the Official Organization that Oversees Nursing, but the Official Organization that Oversees Nursing told us another. Did my wife’s Associate Degree qualify her for a license? Did she have to finish her Bachelor’s first? How long until she could get a license?

Could we make do on just my income and our reserve during that time?

Hard questions. Big, ugly, adult questions.

I wanted us to be able to. My wife wanted us to be able to. We could have scraped by, until. Until this happened. Until that happened. My family could have made the financial sacrifices in order for this to work.

But my wife’s career, the sum of her past fourteen years of professional experience, would be stalled. All the contacts, connections, headway she had made here would have been stopped dead. Licensing would take six months, maybe longer. One source said a year.

And she’d be starting her career at square one.

I had already accepted the dream job offer when we learned this. I had already said yes. The developer had arranged for me to fly up Tuesday to spend three days on-site. While my work visa cleared, they wanted to have me in the office as a consultant. That could take three months, certainly two. I have two small children at home. I’d be away from them, and my wife would probably have to quit her job to be home with them. We have no family in the area and no childcare would accommodate my wife’s thirteen-hour shifts or weekends. With me in another country, she would have to stay home.

I drove down to Chicago on Tuesday to get my passport. I was to fly out that night to be on-site for the rest of the week. This was happening. I showed up, parked, went through security, took the elevator to the 18th floor, got my number, handed in my paperwork, answered their questions, got my slip, walked down the hall, got another number.

I sat. And I waited. And I thought.

My wife has made a great many sacrifices for me as I go about pursuing my dreams. She knew how important this was to me. How huge this was. Like getting plucked from the soil and given the blue ribbon at the county fair. But we both knew this would be a huge blow to her career. I couldn’t ask her to give up everything. I couldn’t ask this smart, driven woman who had spent fourteen years working hard, forging a career from dedication and sweat, to let all that work bottom out because I had been called up to the Big Leagues.

By the time I got my passport, I had declined the job.

I wrote an email to the developer, apologizing and explaining the situation. I offered to reimburse the cost of the plane ticket. My was-to-be creative director said he respected my decision. He said he was looking forward to working with me. He said he hoped maybe we could work together in the future. The producer thanked me for my decision, wished me the best, and said she would invoice me for the $1500 plane ticket.

Ouch.

But, hey, I’d asked for it. I made a promise and broke it. That was my punishment.

I broke a promise, but I made the right decision.

That night, after I got home and the news had been broken, I asked my daughter if she was disappointed that we weren’t moving. She had been looking forward to learning a new language and living in a new city in a new country. She said she was disappointed a bit but that she understood. She asked me if I turned down the offer because of Mommy’s job. I told her, “No. I turned it down because, when you’re a family, it’s more important that an opportunity lift all of us up, not just one. Nobody should get left behind.”

I figured I’d be the guy who grabbed the brass ring no matter what. The guy who gets on the plane, takes the big job, keeps his eye on the prize. Turns out, I’m the guy who stays, waits for another opportunity, keeps his eye on the real prize.

It takes more than a dream job to fulfill a dream. And all it cost me to learn that was the price of plane ticket.