When your Personal Life intersects your Professional Life

I make art for a living. Not many humans get to say that.

I also make games for a living. Fewer still get to say that. 

I also write and make up stories and sometimes get paid for it, usually because of games. 

I am very, very lucky. 

I'm also extremely lucky to have an awesome lady in my life, and we are expecting our first baby girl in the next few days. (At least, we hope. If we go past next Friday then we lose our chance at the Birthing Center with its cute bath tub and hands off approach to natural childbirth, the dream medal for the anatomical marathon that we're about to experience. Her more so than me.) 

So, surprise! :D

Baby Aella is due in the next few days!

Now, it really should be without saying, art and games and writing are all made by people. Not just people as an idea of the theoretical "they" at "that company," but tangible real individuals. 

Those people have lives, and their lives inform their work.

Thinking of the "Great They" is the part of the game that happens after you play the game, or after you read the book, or finished the TV Show.

Even when the Great They is named and you know that name, they are, still, a They. One of Them makes the show, and They are either idiots or geniuses, or just okay at Their job.  

It's extremely difficult to see the fingertips that typed the keys that allowed your inner brain voice to read this line of text. 

It's harder still to take the concept that some other flesh beast out there somewhere made this thing I am consuming. 

It's possible you know them, face to face. But do you really know them?

On some level, the process of rendering a work seems just otherworldly, and it's almost impossible to view a work as something a human being actually made. 

I often feel that way about cars and buildings (I'm not an engineer, so it's easier to ignore the makers marks and tells of design there.) I also feel that way about books and media -- the author is somewhat invisible in them -- even when I watched it materialize right in front of me at my own finger tips.  

At Subway we can watch as a sandwich artist puts together our meal by human hands, by our verbal cues. 

Even there, it's hard to fathom the whole human chain when the finished food is right there. Something about it being finalized just feels like it came from some magic other place.

I am a people watcher, I pay laser sharp attention to the way humans interact, especially when they don't know I'm watching. It's fascinating. 

How do people treat each other, and why, is a trillion dollar question. Entire empires are founded on it. And I like to watch people order their food at Subway (or at least I did before the 2020 Pandemic) and see how they treat the hands that make the food they're about to commit to becoming part of their body. 

Most of us interact with the people giving us life nourishing food the same way we regard those giving us entertainment, sad to say. And that is in an almost drunken obliviousness just a few steps removed from total unconsciousness, then pass some measure of judgment on that person. 

I like to get to know them. Which car is theirs? Where do they go home? Are they tired of this job? Do their kids know what they do for a living? Where did they go to school? Who were their grandparents.

I see chains of these events. It's kind of an unfortunate plight of mine, part of having a brain that's hyper aware and detail oriented I guess. I'm always looking for the invisible threads of fate that are tugging strings here and there, making the critical decisions that determine future events.

What drove the hands that made my food? Are they aware of their part in this life? Are they unconscious, waiting to be anywhere else but here before turning the lights back on in their head?

We expect the hands to do what we asked, and then be forgotten about. 

Is that sad? Or is that just normal?

Maybe the hands want to be forgotten. 

Maybe it would be easier if the hands were faceless. No name tags. No personality. No life history. No connection to the wellspring of fate our ancestors begun thousands and millions of years ago, and millions of years in the future one of a few that survive whatever befalls our species on some distant rock around another sun. 

But I like to see everything in front of me as deeply interwoven beyond sight. Just like plants have roots, there is an unseen thread below the surface that supports the web of interactions that results in the food that I consume. 

In a way, food is the consumption of the concentrated time threads that form knots of fate, and breaking those threads releases the motivation to form new threads and propel us to other fates. Every step that lead to that food lead to giving you this opportunity to live because of it. If any thread had been out of place, so too would you be.

If the suppler of the lettuce or the animal that died to give that rendered down meat had gone missing, if any decision had gone south to introduce toxins or bad temperature, fate would change, just as sure as if the molecules in your gut couldn't process that material if it wasn't there.

You're part of this network. Know it or not. And sometimes it's better not to know.

All of this fate is created out of decision making. 

Decisions people made. 

We consume the decisions of others to live.

And the entertainment industry is no different. 

Tonight, I can't sleep. 

This is an annual issue for me around the solstice and equinox. The solstice has a run up where I'm almost manic. I have tons of energy from 9am til 2 or 3 am. At least 16 hours of just power on, full of zest, gotta do something. 

Then on the other side of the solstice, I crash. Physically and mentally. I get depressed, exhausted, and no matter how much sleep I get it's never enough. I get nothing done, and I'm generally just a worthless human being for a few weeks until it stops and I go back to "normal" for a while, until the next solstice hits.

I'm on the downhill side of this equation right now.

To make matters worse, my partner Ali doesn't sleep more than 3 or 4 hours at a time. not because she's pregnant, which is definitely a contribution, but because for the years I've now known her she goes to bed at 3am to 4am and is very happy with that. She gets up around 12pm and that's just how she naturally lives her life. 

I have to go to bed by about 11:30pm to get any benefit from being in that prison of bedsheets. Any later and the next day I'm a little drowsy if not dogged tired. After 1:30am I'm starting to have a slow unproductive day. After 2:30? I might as well get up and get out of bed, because fuck it, I'll actually go to sleep at 5 or 7am, because that is just how my body handles going to bed too late.  And I spend that day utterly exhausted, half conscious, and in pain from heart burn and fatigue. 

So we've been in a battle with the clock for over a year now, before Aella was conceived and before we even decided to get serious in our relationship, binding our financial and personal lives together. 

Bed time is a hard 11:30. 

Period. 

But she likes to push it. 

She needs a bath before bed, and procrastinates going. 

I like to type and read articles or play around before bed, so I like to say, "hey, you need to stop whatever you're doing and go get a bath. If you don't, I know what happens, we'll crash by 2:00am again. It's 10:30, go take your bath."

And she finds ways to push the clock back. 12:30, 1:30, 2:30...

If I go to bed before she gets to bed, she comes in and wakes me up. It's inevitable then that I stay awake absolutely all night long, possibly until 4am, until I can finally toss and turn my way to sleep. 

I need to sleep in temperatures under 68F. Any hotter and my flesh, which is like a boiling plasma, will keep me rapt in flames all night. 

I also need perfect darkness and silence. If I hear white noise, I'm awake. If I hear a 60hz buzz from my sub woofer I have to unplug it. A fan? Fuck fans. 

When the neighbor across the street leaves their house at 3am, no matter how deep asleep I was, I hear it and remember it the next morning. 

The problem is, I'm not a light sleeper. 

I'm actually never fully asleep.

I don't sleep. At all. I'm partially conscious all night long except where I finally enter REM. The gap between my REM and full consciousness is just a few minutes, maybe up to 5 minutes. I've had sleep studies done and they were all baffled. No sleep apnea, no usual symptoms of illness -- just a strange cognitive state that lasts all night until dipping into REM and then shooting back out of it. 

So sleep and I have a bit of a traumatic relationship. I view bed time the way my dog views getting a bath. (He hates it.)

I actually genuinely loath my bed, and wish I never had to sleep, ever again. I find the entire sleep system a ridiculous waste of biological effort, and I resent that I'm a slave to it. If not sleeping didn't utterly ruin my day, leaving me unproductive and exhausted, I'd never give it another second of my life. 

But here I am. 

It's 3:50. 

At 3:00 I got out of bed because, after saying we need to get in bed over and over this night, my partner betrayed me and came into our room at 1:45am. Well past the time my brain couldn't sleep. 

I stayed up waiting for her to manage her baby registry til 2:30, then went to bed. At 3:00am, she got in bed. 

I lasted about 5 minutes before, mmmm, nope, not going through this shit again, and I just got out of bed and left the room. 

That is what made me sit down to write this. 

My personal life, is about to crash into my professional life, in a huge way. 

Just like we don't often think about where our food or entertainment comes from, I often times forget that I too am human, and my work depends on me being able to do it, to do it. 

Maybe that betrays a little bit of executive dysfunction, but it's true. I often forget myself, and work insane hours. I also, thanks to my new relationship, have a very precarious relationship with sleep. More precarious than it ever has been, and more dangerous to my professional performance.

Part of becoming a dad is admitting when you need to take stock and look at the hours you are working and the hours you spend taking care of your family. 

That may mean, to your audience, an inevitable interruption of service. 

We don't get to see the lives of our authors very often. When we do, it's usually in the form of PR polished presentations or exposes. 

But what are they really doing when they're not at work?

Should the life of an author matter so long as the work gets done?

Yeah -- it's how you do the work that matters -- and to make work that matters, your life has to matter. 

That author has to eat. (HAS TO SLEEP!) Has to have a house to live in. A place to work. The tools to do the work. 

And most of all, time to do the work. 

How much time is enough time is a hard question to answer. 

Every work is different. Some of my books I've been writing 20 years, going back and rewriting. Others have been ten days or less and bam, out comes a game or piece of television / movie.  

The quick wins like that are often my most important work commercially. Really what those short quick works are, is a compilation of all the practice and thought I put into other work, that never made it to screen. So you could say that I prepared for years to do something in a few days, and that would be true. A lot of games or franchises work that way. 

But, I can't work, if I can't sleep. 

That is a critical breakdown in the personal/professional life dynamic.

Now begins my long trip into fatherhood. 

A huge portion of my day is about to get dedicated to raising Aella as best I can. The rest dedicated to helping mommy recover, because Ali will need a lot of help adjusting to her new life. 

Team projects like Morningstar, New California, SOS, and Cartel Tycoon are all about living in service of your partners. Fatherhood is true to that as well, so I'm about to live less for me than I ever have, so there's just less of me to go around. 

I have to ask some hard questions about what I spend my time on. 

And my Patreon is definitely one of those things I need to spend energy keeping up to date. Maybe with some personal life updates in addition to regular project updates.  

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse behind the scenes. 

most people never get to see where the magic happens or where the products come from. But the products become part of your fate, just as yours by supporting me is tied up in mine.

I'll report back in after I've had time to settle in to a new routine and clean up my schedule. :)