I have always been plagued by the demon known as Ambition. As a youth, I never felt at home in the place I grew up in. I always wanted more. I knew my life was elsewhere. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do but I knew I couldn’t do it in the rural NEOhioan town in which I was raised.

In my late teens, I met a girl. A girl I would end up marrying. Her career would take us to the Cleveland suburbs–which offered more but still wasn’t enough for me. I took jobs that weren’t good fits but would do for now while I figured out what it was I was going to do for a career.

I worked hard, I put together a tabletop game called Little Fears, which became a critical darling and an indie hit. It opened up doors for me in the field of game design. In 2004, I accepted a position with Human Head Studios as the director of their adventure games division. It was a big opportunity in a new city, a new state. I uprooted my wife and our young daughter to Madison, Wisconsin. I moved them away from family–both mine and my wife’s–in pursuit of a dream. I worked at that studio for a few years before moving on to a local video game startup as an associate game designer. When that place shuttered, I turned to freelance to keep afloat.

The entire time, I looked for a new opportunity. A new position. A new studio. A new place. I eventually found that in 2012 when I accepted a position at Volition in Champaign, Illinois.

Once again, I pulled up the family stakes and relocated us–my wife and now two kids–to start over. New city, new friends, new jobs for both of us adults. A clean slate.

The move was hard. I went ahead and lived in an economy hotel for a week before settling into a rental home for a month while my wife got everything in Madison ready for transition. A huge endeavor that she handled alone. Eventually, they moved down and we started our life there. We made friends, we bought a house, our roots began to tendril into the soil and take hold. But I would soon yank them out.

I stayed with Volition until Spring 2018, when I accepted an offer at Funcom in Durham, North Carolina. A lot of reasons, a lot of emotions, went into that move. I didn’t have to go. It wasn’t like it was in Madison where I was at the whim of contracts and my own meager publications to stay afloat. But, still, it was a new opportunity, a new title, a new studio, and I felt the pull of Ambition telling me to “Go. Go now.”

It wasn’t the first opportunity to leave Volition that I had. I had interviewed at multiple other places, gotten offers, accepted one, and even planned to follow through with it before life went south. My dad got sick. My friends asked me to stay. It was a lot on my shoulders, and I eventually had to pull out of that opportunity. I stayed at Volition for another year or so.

But the demon Ambition was ever-present on my shoulders. My dad passed. My mom was looking to relocate, to be nearer to us. I thought the opportunity at Funcom would be the right one. A good place for us all to be. A big job title at a company whose games I dug.

Again, I packed up the family and moved us far away. Goodbye, friends. Goodbye, jobs. Goodbye, Champaign.

The demon Ambition smiled.

But life in North Carolina was rocky. We went through the motions but they were so hollow. My family was unhappy. My wife and kids were far away from long-time friends. My wife’s community was states away. Intellectually, I knew that. I thought I understand. But I was blind to what that really meant.

In Summer 2019, my life imploded. My wife asked for a divorce. She and the kids went back to Champaign. Funcom and I parted ways. I floundered. I desperately submitted resumes to everywhere. I had some really promising calls. But it was an opportunity at a place I had once contracted that was the no-brainer. I was offered a job in Chicago, just a few hours away from where my kids would be. At a studio I liked, working with some people I had known for nearly two decades.

But my mom had bought a house in North Carolina just a couple months prior and was relocating. She had an offer on her house in that small town in Ohio I grew up in. That house I grew up in. She was uprooting her life, everything she had known for 40 years, to be closer to her family. Just in time for all of us to go away.

The demon Ambition laughed. It had claimed yet another victim. Another casualty of my selfishness and narrow-minded tunnel vision. How had I become so greedy? So self-centered? So blind to the fact I had sworn to share a life with others, not just drag them along in my wake as I went where the whim and the whimsy took me?

I couldn’t stand what had happened. It was like looking at a seven-car pileup that you had caused. It was too big to comprehend. Too painful to absorb at all once. All I could do was reel from the impact, segment, and dissociate as I worked through what my life–what so many lives–had become. Because of me.

I started my new job in September of last year. I love it. I’m getting to use design muscles I haven’t flexed in years. I work with an amazing team. The project is dope. I like being in the Chicago suburbs. My kids visit me and I visit them. I got to take them to Medieval Times to see the new show. I get to pop into IKEA to grab cheap Scandinavian furniture whenever I want. Well, I used to before the pandemic happened.

I live in a small apartment just minutes from the office, though that’s less of a benefit given the entire state is under a Shelter in Place order. But still.

I’ve been here now for seven months and I’ve tried to get settled. I’ve tried to find “home” in this place even though I’m going through a divorce, live away from my kids, and my mom is now 18 hours away, living near no support system whatsoever.

My job has been the one port in this storm that has kept me sane and kept me grounded while every other aspect of my life raged around me. Over time, I’ve calmed and settled and taken stock. I’m slowly establishing something here. But there’s still been a sense of detachment. I look around and I’m trying to find my life in all this. The one drop of paint in the ocean.

And that’s where I’ve been for a long time now, awash amidst so much newness and uncertainty. Smashing against the rocks like my family did every time I grabbed them by the shoulders and shoved them in a new direction.

Ambition is still on my shoulder, jumping up and down, demanding attention. But I don’t listen anymore.

I stopped listening after everything blew up. I realized what a demon Ambition was. I realized what it had cost my family and, in turn, what it had cost me.

The pieces of the puzzle had been assembling for months. I was starting to see the picture of destruction and devastation but I was missing a vital piece. Again, I understood it intellectually but it wasn’t internalized, it wasn’t realized within me.

Funnily enough, it was a video game that helped me truly sort it out.

I picked up Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Switch earlier this week. I originally got it so that my son and I could play and share our experiences. But, as I got more and more into the game, my eyes opened to feelings, realizations, that had been dormant inside of me, awaiting a light to be shined on them.

It started with placing the tent, establishing where my character would live on this new island. It’s one of the first things you do in the game but it places a stake in the ground around which everything else revolves. You don’t truly understand the ramifications of this choice until later, until more people are involved, more of the island comes to life.

The first few days of playing, I went through the routine: gather resources, complete objectives, build what’s needed, talk to people. My duty was a shopping list: do this, get that, do this, get that.

I was having fun but it was surface. Then I got some fun furniture and decorations. I put them on the wall. I built tables and chairs and a bed and I meticulously sorted everything out. I planted flowers around my house, around my neighbors’ houses. I put up a fence around the museum and planted a tree. I fussed over where to put the outdoor furniture in the homes I was building for new villagers to enjoy.

I visited other islands, saw what people had established on their own. I saw the pride in which they were creating their new world. I took ideas, inspiration, and brought it over to my island. I did more. I planted more. I built more. I had a new drive, a new purpose. I had…pride.

I wanted to make my little home on my little island the best it could be. I wanted to set down roots for my character and build a community for them. I talk to the other villagers to build relationships. I give them presents. I want them to be happy. I want them to be my community. I want to stay on this little island and make it somewhere I can call “home.”

It hit me like a slap in the face. This was what I had been missing in the real world. This sense. I had had houses, and friends, and routines but never a sense of pride, of community, of home. The demon Ambition had my head spinning, always looking toward the horizon for the next new thing. I never got to enjoy where I was, what I was doing. I left that to others. Sure, I fixed the toilet and hung up some pictures but it was rote. I was lacking that connection. I had routines but they were obligation at best.

43 years and it took a video game about animals building a town to teach me what comes naturally to so many others.

I’ve been a fool. I listened to the wrong things. I wanted the wrong things. And it cost me everything that mattered to me.

While it’s too late to undo the damage I’ve done in real life, I can start anew with this knowledge in hand. I can build a new life, can find joy inside a smaller radius, can look to the horizon and see the sunrise instead of a destination. I can decapitalize ambition and turn it from a demon to something manageable. I can still want without needing to salt the earth behind me.

I can and have apologized for what I’ve done in the pursuit of whatever it was I was chasing for so many years. It won’t untie the knot, it won’t put the apple back on the tree, but my sense of sorrow and regret is sincere. I am so sorry to those my lust for Ambition has affected. My family, most of all, but my friends, their friends, my community, their community.

I am still learning, still trying to figure this out. But I will continue to build, to live, to be, to grow. And if you stop my island–in the game or here in the Chicago suburbs–forgive the mess. It’s still under construction.

I think I’m starting to understand the concept of putting down roots. Staying in a place for a while. Staying at a job, a company for a long time. It’s…weird for me.

I never felt a connection to my hometown. And I always dreamt of having what is a rather impractical career.

When I was younger, I bounced around a variety of jobs that I hoped were never gonna turn into my career. So leaving when things got hard or tiring often felt like my best option. I didn’t want to work at those jobs forever so why put up when things weren’t great?

When my wife and I moved closer to Cleveland for her job, it was no big deal for me. The move meant closer proximity to cool things and I could continue to work on being a writer as I went from job to job.

Moving to Madison was harder–because of proximity to family–but it was a shot at working on something I truly love so we took it.

My need to move forward in my career outweighed pretty much every other factor.

And Madison is a great town. It’s my favorite town out of all the places I’ve lived. (London is my favorite town I’ve ever visited.)

Years later, I left that job for another job in the same area. And then that shop closed down. And I had no other opportunities.

This is the time when I launched a new edition of Little Fears and kicked off Operation: Awesome which were my attempts to hone my abilities and get practical, real product out there.

This led to some very welcome freelance gigs but it meant I was in constant pitching, constant working. I did anything and everything not just to scrape together taco money but to work my craft.

I wrote numerous bits and pieces for tabletop games (some of which paid, some of which got published, something that did both, some that did neither) and started doing article writing for AdventureGamers.com.

Once a year, I’d land a whale: a multi-month video game gig that helped us get through the leaner periods.

I was in panic mode this whole time. Every offer was short-term and I needed to find real stable full-time work. So I could catch my breath if nothing else.

I spent many years chasing a full-time opportunity. Any full-time opportunity. None of the work I got lasted all that long so I needed to be constantly looking for the next gig.

2012 is when everything changed. When I got an amazing offer–but had to walk away. When I won second prize at two different studios.

And then I landed the job at Volition.

But now, five years later, I am still always looking over my shoulder for the next thing. When things get too hard, my instinct is to look for another job.

I’ve developed a lot of bad habits–some necessary, some not–and they’re hard to shake.

All of this has prevented me from being comfortable putting down roots.

Why should I when I’m just gonna bounce, right?

But the truth is I’m in my chosen career, doing a job I love on amazingly “me” projects, working with amazing people–many of whom have become good friends. But I’ve never shaken off this perpetual fight or flight sensation.

It’s become something that nags at me. My obsessive tendencies likely exacerbate this.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, as I’ve spent all this time at home due to my dying leg/recent hip replacement. And I think about my kids and their friendships. And my house and how I’ve just started having movie nights with family and friends. And how Champaign doesn’t have all the amenities on my wishlist but I have access to a lot of great parks and shops and restaurants.

I’ve been here five years. Not just in Champaign but at Volition. This is my longest stint at a job in my life–by some magnitude.

And I wonder if I can set down roots here. If I can put away the paranoia and fear and just relax. Just enjoy life and the area and, yeah, some times will be harder than others but maybe it’s worth pushing through.

I wonder. And I think maybe I can.

It might be time for me to catch my breath.

This is gonna be mostly old hat to most writers, I reckon, but every author goes through their own journey and such so this is new and revelatory to me, at the very least.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the core essence of story lately in light of a) always wanting to get better at my craft and b) having a novel make the agent rounds to some initial interest but not enough to seal a deal.

And that initial interest is a really good data point to have. I managed to move beyond the query stage with a good handful of agents but the manuscript didn’t connect enough for them to say “Yes, I must have this!” What that’s telling me is that I am far enough into my novel-writing ability to have a solid concept and my query was good enough to pique their interest but the work itself wasn’t bulletproof which is where I ultimately want my writing to be.

Turning that over, and working on my 30k word Little Fears novel, The Wolf Pact, has caused a couple thoughts to bubble to the surface.

Thought One: What’s the story about?

More a question that a thought but it’s the first question I need to answer before moving forward. It’s essential.

Now, when most folks ask “What the story about?” they mean (or at least get an answer pertaining to) the genre, details of the world and characters, and cool stuff that happens. But that’s all much lower level than I initially need to be.

For me, the answer to “What’s the story about?” is “This is a story about how [BLANK] learns [BLANK].”

Everything else is details.

In The Wolf Pact, Nate Torrance is a boy who discovers there’s a world of monsters that exists next to ours. Throughout his investigation, he makes friends with a girl named Jennifer Mills who has her own tie to monsters and, together, they uncover the truth about some wolf attacks in the area.

But, really, The Wolf Pact is a story about how Nate Torrance learns about friendship.” As his oldest friendship with his neighbor starts to fall apart, he builds a new friendship with Jennifer. That’s the essence of the story.

Also, that second blank is the story’s theme. “Friendship” is the theme of The Wolf Pact.

Thought Two: What about the protagonist is being challenged?

Okay, so this thought is another question. And it stems from the first.

If this is a story about how Nate Torrance learns about friendship, what about Nate is being challenged that leads to an epiphany? In The Wolf Pact, Nate holds firm that friendships are fixed. They don’t change. They certainly don’t end. It’s one of his principles. That his neighbor, who is older than Nate, is moving on forces Nate to try to reclaim that friendship. Jennifer wants to be friends with Nate but the boy is resistant. Not due to a flaw in Jennifer but a flaw in himself.

Thought Three: How is the theme supported?

Okay, so now we’re onto question three which calls back to question one. How am I supporting the theme? Perhaps a better term is “exploring.”

I’m exploring the theme of friendship by presenting different sides of it: the neighbor is moving on from friendship. Jennifer is trying to build a new friendship with Nate. Nate is trying to learn how friendship works. The antagonists also address this theme of friendship which is tied into the book’s name. The titular wolf pact is a core expression of friendship and how beholden one is to a promise made in youth.

Thought Four: How does the protagonist change?

Hrm. So all these thoughts are questions. Good to know.

Okay, I know the story is about how Nate learns about friendship. I know his idea that friendships don’t change is what will be challenged throughout the story. And I know I’ll explore the theme of “friendship” by showing different perspectives and stages of it. But what will ultimately change about how Nate views friendship? Once he has all this information and has seen the theme of friendship from multiple viewpoints, what does he do about it?

I won’t spoil that in this post (you’ll have to read the book to find out) but the basic options are: he accepts that friendships change or he rejects that friendships change. There are additional levels of complexity to this of course but those are the top levels I’m concerning myself with.

In Sum

With those in mind, I was finally able to approach The Wolf Pact armed with the information I needed to start. Next came outlining, developing subplots (which go through their own version of this but with a mind of supporting the established theme), and then the actual writing.

I’ll be very interested to see how this all comes together in the finished project and how everyone reacts to it. Either way, these kinds of revelations help make my writing stronger which is my ultimate goal. Is it bulletproof yet? No. But it’s another level of armor and that’s good enough for now.

I don’t remember the exact date that I went crazy, but I remember the weeks preceding it.

In mid-June 2004, I got sick. I didn’t know what it was at first. I worked during the day at a local internet provider. At 5p, I’d come home, and immediately go to bed. I couldn’t stay awake. I would get so tired, I could barely stand. I would pass out at 6p and stay asleep until I had to get up for work the next morning. At first, I figured it was just a bug and I would shake it soon. But it lasted a week. Then another week. So, at the urging of my wife, I went to the doctor. After a comedy of errors, including a completely unnecessary overnight stay in the hospital, I was diagnosed with mono. Which is as awful, soul-sucking, life-draining a disease as I’ve ever gotten.

Great.

Origins 2004 was coming up—a mid-sized gaming convention that was only a couple hours away from my house. I was with an outfit called Key 20 back then—a sideline tabletop publishing and consolidation business I ran with a friend—and had to be there. So I went. Sick. I powered through the first couple days as best I could. On the third day, a Saturday, a miracle happened. I woke up in my hotel room and I felt better. Not just better, I felt good. I was over it. I had survived mono. Naturally, I partied like crazy that night.

The convention was soon over. I’d had a lot of fun hanging with some faraway friends, sold some books, and came home. Whew. I had made it through.

Time passed. And I started to notice something.

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Obvious revelation that reared its head into my brain a bit ago so I thought I’d share.

Doing nothing leads to doing more nothing. Most folks know that. But the inverse is also true. When you do something, especially if you feel a reward from it, you want to keep doing it. Inertia is the mindkiller. Want to create? Create. Start small if you want but keep doing it.

Want to write? 50 words a day. Anybody can do that. 50 words every day. That’s literally a couple minutes. You have them. Write during lunch. Write while in the bathroom. Write before you go to bed. If you can’t do 50, do 20. Write one sentence. Over time, you put down enough words, you’ll have something. A song, a poem, a story, a novel, a memoir. Something.

Want to draw? One shape a day. A circle, a square, a line. Again: minutes a day. If that. Over time, you’ll have a diagram, an illustration, a comic strip, a drawing of a loved one. Something.

Want to play an instrument? One note or chord a day. Over time, you’ll learn guitar, bass, violin, piano. Something.

Want to learn a language? A word or phrase a day. Over time, you’ll be able to converse with people in their native tongue.

Don’t worry about making any of this good. Or for other people. Do this for you. Don’t sweat whether a phrase is clumsy or a face is lopsided or you press too close to the fret or you might be pronouncing a vowel flatly.

The time is going to pass anyway. I hope you have a bunch of time. Spend it with loved ones, spend it on hobbies, spend it on entertainment. But take a few minutes a day to explore something or create something. You might find you love it and want to dedicate ten minutes a day to doing it. Maybe an hour. Maybe you set aside a couple evenings a week. Maybe not. Maybe you stick to doing 2-3 minutes a day. It doesn’t matter.

Do this for you. Do something new. Learn something new. You may have a lot more to contribute to this world than you realize.

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.

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Aaron T. Huss, from Mystical Throne Entertainment, contacted me recently about doing a Designer’s Diary for his Roleplayers Chronicle website and I quickly agreed. The piece went live over the weekend and touches briefly on the work that went into my Little Fears Nightmare Edition project as well as some of the history behind the game.

You can check it out here.

Big thanks to Aaron for the opportunity!

One thousand words. It’s not a lot. But neither is a single grain of sand.

Earlier this year, I hit a hard realization: Writing wasn’t working for me anymore. I was writing in spurts. Some days I’d hit 3000 words but most days I wasn’t writing anything. Operation: Awesome was stalling, and I needed to jumpstart the engine if it was going to survive.

Part of Operation: Awesome was collecting the tools I should’ve gathered a decade ago: the study, the concept of form and genre (Step One), the dedication to a path (Step Two), and reading regularly (Step Three). I was doing well at those. I obsessed over structure and story, knew the type of career I want to have, and have been reading stacks of books in my audience and genre. Operation: Awesome had fixed a lot of my flaws as a writer, or helped me work on fixing them anyway, but I was struggling with one very important thing. I lacked the discipline to write (Step Four) and with every day I became less motivated to work on that discipline.

I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to writing. Most of my time is spent raising my kids (and my dogs and cat and, well, the chinchilla pretty much takes care of himself). My wife and I don’t have the cash to put my son into daycare so, even though my daughter is at school, my attention is elsewhere throughout the day. When my wife gets home, I want to spend time with her and the kids. By the time bedtime rolls around, I’m out of juice. Sometimes she doesn’t get home until after 8 o’clock at night which leaves me even more exhausted (and is she too). After 13+ hours of always-on fathering, I just don’t have the word count in me. I sit and read or catch up on television or play games. Or, maybe, on rare occasion, hang out with friends.

In recent months, that routine had worn me to a nub. I was stressed to my limit, and I started to resent writing. I felt too much pressure to cram all my week’s writing into two days. Any other time I wasn’t writing, when I was spending time with family or catching up on books/games/shows, I felt like I was wasting time I should be writing. I was stymied.

My work and my life were too muddled and I wasn’t dedicating the time and attention I should to either. I had hit a wall, and I had to make a choice: Write or find something else to do.

In order to make sense of this, I did what my pretentious teenaged self should have done, I turned to the professionals for advice. I read somewhere that Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing and Little Brother fame) has (or maybe had) a writing goal of 250 words a day. Stephen King, one of the most popular American novelists of all time, writes 2000 words a day.

That blew my mind. These guys weren’t nose-first in their work from dawn to dusk as I imagined. A lot of aspiring authors I know huddle in front of their screens day-in and day-out and, hey, if I could, I would probably do the exact same thing. But I can’t. I have other, bigger responsibilities, but I knew I could find a sweet spot between Doctorow and King, something that worked for me.

I looked at my schedule and contracts and realized to hit my deliverables, I only needed to write 1000 words a day. That’s it. About an hour’s worth of work. While I can’t park my son in front of the television for six hours every day, I can set him in front of Sesame Street or a couple episodes of Dora (or, his favorite, Dino Dan) and crank out 1000 words.

I decided that was my plan. I would write 1000 words a day, every day. But, I added some rules to make that more meaningful:

A Thousand Words of Fiction or Other Paid Work. Not blog posts, Twitter, emails, LittleFears.com updates, or even the work I do for AdventureGamers.com. The thousand words had to be on projects I was selling (or hoping to sell) or paid gigs. All that other stuff had to be done outside the goal, at night or during the extra work hours my wife’s days off allowed me.

No Making Up Missed Days. I couldn’t push one day’s work onto another. Meaning: I couldn’t skip Tuesday but promise myself I’d write 2000 Wednesday. If I didn’t hit my goal on a day, I had to accept that as failure even if I did write 2000 words the next day. (I take this from something attributed to Jerry Seinfeld: When you hit your day’s writing goal, mark it on a calendar. As the chain of marked days grows, you become more motivated not to break the chain.)

I Couldn’t Write Ahead. Same idea as above. I couldn’t buy a half-day Tuesday by writing 1500 words on Monday. Each day’s goal was separate.

I Could Go Over. If I felt inspired, I could do 1500 or 2000 or more. But I didn’t have to. 1000 was the goal.

That was a couple months ago. Overall, I’ve done well. I’ve missed days but not enough to beat myself up. On the positive side, I’ve noticed some big changes beyond the increase in productivity:

I’m Happier. Writing is working for me again. I get my 1000 done and the writing stress is gone. I’m not up late berating myself for watching Supernatural or playing games instead of writing.

I Have Gained Control of My Schedule. Since I know my output, I can better gauge my workload. This means I know at a glance if I can take on other work or if I have to turn something down. This is new to me (and is a big reason I was not good at freelancing for so long). But now I know my schedule and I don’t overload it.

I Jump Into Writing More Easily. Another great piece of writing advice, attributed to multiple sources, is to stop writing in mid-idea so you know where to pick up the next day. Writing only 1000 words puts me mid-idea almost every time so I come back to a project knowing where to start. The words flow from there.

I Have More Writing Energy. Because I’m not squeezing 5000 words out of my day’s imagination reservoir, I come into the daily goal refreshed, with a full day’s creative rest between rather small bursts of output.

So, after a long time struggling with my goals as a writer, I have found a system that is working for me. I’ve already handed in a bunch of contract work and am almost done with a new book for Little Fears Nightmare Edition.

A side effect of the new plan saw my last bit of contract work line up with May 31st, meaning I was free to start new projects on June 1st. After some noodling, I put down designs for the Big Summer Project, which I’ve codenamed Operation: Last Chance. This is something that terrifies and excites me in almost equal measure. See, there’s more to this new phase than I have said, more at stake than simply hitting a daily goal, but I can’t talk about it just now. I’ll leave the details of that for another time.

I awoke Sunday morning to some terrible news: My PlayStation 2 was dead. Some kids were playing around and one of them, a friend of my daughter, had accidentally stepped on the disc tray, shattering it. As far as I can tell, it’s irreparable or, rather, it would cost more to replace the drive than replace the whole system. The culprit confessed and seemed genuinely sorry (or perhaps just scared of being punished) and, upset though I was, I accepted the apology and sent her off to play.

It wasn’t the loss of the physical product that saddened me. Sure, I still have a stack of unplayed PS2 games but I can buy a replacement PS2 on the cheap. What I mourn is what the PlayStation 2 meant to me.

I bought it at the beginning of Fall 2005. My wife, daughter, and I had moved from Cleveland, Ohio to Madison, Wisconsin for a job with video game developer Human Head Studios the year before. The move was not without considerable expense with us balancing rent here with mortgage there until our house finally sold that August. Moving away from friends and family was also a big deal. The sense of separation and the strained budget took its toll on us but we managed best we could. I was following a dream and that’s not always the easiest thing to do.

I had fallen out of video gaming for a couple years prior to the move. I got into gaming in the mid-80s with the 2600 and continued to game through every generation up to the original PlayStation. I loved video games and was passionate about them through my formative years up until my early twenties. But when the PS2, Dreamcast, and GameCube war began, I mostly sat it out. I picked up a GameCube midway through the generation but only had a handful of games for it. I took on other interests, leaving video gaming mostly on the shelf. But the job at Human Head, being surrounded by video game development and chatter, reignited that passion and I poked my head into the scene once again.

I remember coming into the office one night and sitting down to the office Xbox. I fumbled my way through some Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Destroy All Humans! and managed not to do too horribly for an hour or so. That little taste was enough; I was hooked. I wanted to get back into gaming and that right now. But we didn’t have the money for a new console alone much less the memory card, extra controller, and, y’know, games that come along with it. My wife had already sacrificed enough uprooting her life for my career, much less the strain we were still under, for me to push too hard for one.

That September though, a few weeks after the house sold and nine months into our new lives as Madisonians, I mentioned wanting a game system to my wife over a meal at the local mall food court, a sad attempt at a gambit as ever there was.

“How much do they cost?”

“About $200. Less if you buy it used.”

“Well, let’s take a look.”

I didn’t question it.

We walked over to the GameStop and started piecing and pricing the options. I had spent a lot of time watching G4 and reading online reviews. I knew I wanted a PlayStation 2. I had a mental list of the games I wanted to get along with it. It was late in the current generation so there were a lot of great titles to choose from. The store was running a 2-for-1 used sale and I took advantage of it, amassing a fine starter kit. I added it all up together and it came to about $200. There were probably better ways to spend that money but my wife didn’t flinch. She put her hand on my arm and smiled. “Get it.”

I walked out of that store with the biggest, dumbest grin on my face. I knew it was a sacrifice for me to get this, and I knew this meant my wife supported this new leg of my life’s journey to the fullest. As funny as it may sound, I have never been more grateful for any gift I’ve ever received in my life.

In the years since that purchase, I’ve caught up with the video game scene. I stay current on new titles, what’s in development, what’s happening with studios (especially since I have many good friends spread throughout them), and what trends are shaping the industry. That PlayStation 2, bought used five years ago, was the beginning of a journey that has led down some interesting paths and allowed me to land some great jobs in the video game industry. It’s allowed me to start crafting the life and career I’ve wanted.

It was also a symbol of my wife’s belief in me and investment in my crazy dream. And though that belief and investment are still there, more now than ever, the symbol is gone. And that’s what I mourn.

Goodbye, PlayStation 2. You weren’t always mine but you treated me like I was the only one in the world. You were always there for me, ready to do battle against overwhelming odds, topple screen-filling giants, belt out bar standards, jam on a plastic guitar, or just relax with some falling blocks and rolling balls. Thank you for the good times then and even better times to come.

See, I lost focus.

And that happens. I’m fallible and I know it. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have initiated Operation: Awesome. I would have just sat around wondering why no one recognized my genius.

A couple weeks ago, I talked about how I had some connections to a potential publisher and how I was looking at novel options suited for that. I let those connections overshadow something very crucial: the identity I want as a writer. Instead of thinking “What type of career do I want?” I thought “What’s my best chance of getting published?”

Now that’s not a bad question to ask. If you have an opportunity, hey, take it. I will never fault a creative for taking the money. In this case, the opportunity was something I’d like to have, yes, but not what I really truly want. My passion lies somewhere else. When I walk into a bookstore, I know the section that feels like home. I know where I want my books to be stocked. When I look at the list of authors I’m studying, they’re in that section. And while I read books in a variety of genres and markets, I have a clear vision of who I am as an author right now and where I want my career to start.

So I’m not writing one of the novels I talked about in that post. I’m still writing a novel. I’m just not writing the novel that makes sense for that connection. I’m writing the novel I want to write. The novel that makes me smile and makes me want to keep writing.