Archives for April 2013

I never wanted to be the guy standing out in his yard with a garden hose watering his lawn.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind you.  I’ve just never been the kind of dude to get all excited about TURF BUILDER and BROADLEAF KILLING ACTION.

But I did sometimes sit around dreaming about what it’d be like to own a home (you know, having a house on a nice plot of land and a nearby stream and a dog and a little writing cottage where I could sneak out back and write while wearing an over-sized woolen cardigan and sipping a steaming cup of tea while it snowed).

Somehow in becoming a home owner, I became the guy who stands in his yard with a garden hose watering the lawn.

Dreams are funny like that.  Even when you achieve them, they often come with a bunch of other stuff that’s just as annoying or tedious as anything you had to deal with before you accomplished them.

Many authors discover that once they’ve Become Published, they have to spend an awful lot of time doing things that aren’t Writing, like interviews and book signings and guest blog posts and generally all the other self-promoting type activities that most of them never wanted to do in the first place.

A lot of entrepreneurs leave their humdrum 9-to-5 40-hour-a-week corporate job to go do The Thing They Love, and discover that now they’re working 8AM-to-midnight 100-hour-a-week jobs (because they only work 4 hours on Sundays) that include a whole bunch of stuff like sending out invoices and filing taxes and wondering why they’re making less now than they did working for The Man.

And don’t even get me started about what designing video games is REALLY like.  (Hint: It, surprisingly, from what I can tell so far, does NOT involve dropping off that 149 page notebook you filled up with GOOD IDEAS when you were in high school and returning 6 months later to find it implemented Just As You Envisioned and awesome.)

SPOILER ALERT:  The tedious will always be with you, wherever you go.  It’s part of the hidden cost of The Dream. But it’s a whole lot easier to handle when you’re dealing with the tedious bits of The Dream, instead of the tedious bits of the other thing you’re doing instead of The Dream.

(And by a whole lot, I might actually mean only marginally so.)

Because at least then there is Purpose.

At least, that’s what I try to tell myself when I’m standing in the front lawn in my bathrobe, dark socks, and flip flops, garden hose in hand, showering my precious baby grass seedlings and desperately hoping that maybe this will be the year they turn the tide against all the brown and yellowy gross creeping plant things that require no tending whatsoever to completely dominate a lawn and yet are, for some reason, not considered suitable ground cover by anyone else in the neighborhood not that I’m bitter.

There’s this thing about working in game development where you work lots of overtime and then at the end of the project, sometimes the Overlords will be kind enough to give you that time back.  They call it comp time.  Because, you know, they are compensating you for all the extra time you put in.

This isn’t unique to the games industry of course.  But regardless of the industry, the fact is IT’S ALL A LIE.

You can’t give time back.  Time used is gone forever.  It’s irreplaceable.  Sure you might get a few extra days to kick back and relax (or to finally do laundry! or shower!!), but that doesn’t do anything to give you back the nights you didn’t tuck your kids in, or the weekends you sent your significant other off on a vacation without you, or the opportunities you missed to pursue that side-business, or the meals you skipped, or the exercise you didn’t do.

Just another way that The Man is keeping us all down and stealing our dreams and keeping us sedated so we don’t realize it.

Except it’s not just The Man.  We do it to ourselves all the time.  We put off doing the things we know we should and promise we’ll double down tomorrow.  Or next week.  Or for the New Year.  But that’s not really how it works.

Every day that we spend not reading to our children, or listening to our spouse, or praying, or Doing The Work is another day we gave up to do something else, like watch reality TV.  Which ISN’T EVEN REALITY (spoiler).

As much as I want to, I can’t go back and cram five days of intense Lego-building into the lives of my kids and think that’s going to somehow undo the three weeks I spent on a business trip.  Those three weeks are gone.  I can’t go a month of avoiding The Novel and think that I can make up for it with a flurry of Intense Devotion the next month.  Ignoring your blog for two weeks and then writing five posts in a row doesn’t bring back the people who gave up looking at the same old posts on Day 10.

(I’M LOOKING AT YOU, ME!) (I’ve never written five posts in a row, so don’t talk to me that way, self!)

All that said, there’s no reason to beat ourselves up when we haven’t been as diligent as we would’ve liked, or haven’t devoted time to the things we really wish we had.  There’s a saying that I really like that I totally just invented right now which is trademarked TM me that goes:

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.  The second best time is now.

(Google may tell you that this is actually an ancient Chinese proverb, but I like to think of it more as spontaneous, completely independent invention, which I thought of totally on my own, at the exact moment or possibly the split-second after I read it somewhere else.)

Which is all just a way to remind myself that tonight is a Writing Night, not a Refresh Twitter Constantly one.