A Very Special Episode: Freelancing is for Suckers

Am I doing this right?

Goddamn, it's been forever since I've updated here at the Gamewerks. It's not like I have a good excuse, 'cause I don't really. I mean, I've been busy with being Nervous McNewdad, my family came on up to visit, I started finishing my basement, and I'm still writing about Space Marines. Also, I need to get this writing sample done for Pinnacle and I should probably, you know, get my games ready for Origins. What I have been doing is doing entirely too much moping about and not enough writing. Remember how I said I was gonna write a novel this year? Yeeaaaaah... It's June already and I don't have word one written. Awesome. So, I'm going to start the week with something a little different. Yet again, it's a very special episode of MCGW.

Now, when I started this project I swore that I wasn't going to make it into some mewling, navel-gazing, emo-LiveJournal tour de force wherein I talked about my feelings and cried about how hard my life is. While I'm not exactly going to do that here, I do want to just talk about some things that are on my mind.

You know what? Sometimes I just wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. I'm 34 years old, and I feel like I've been pissing my life away since I was twenty. All these years I've been wandering around, trying to find something I'm good at. I spent a shitload of money to go to culinary school to find out that I don't want to chef for a living and can't stand working in restaurants. I spent seven years pounding my head against a wall as a commercial and editorial photographer, scrambling for smaller and smaller pieces of an ever decreasing pie in an industry that was already dying when I got into it. I didn't want to quit, though. I wanted to prove I could do it, I was afraid to be labelled a quitter. Something I learned pretty early on was, "If the going gets tough, quit and go do something else. Oh, and make sure you blame someone else for your failure." Good one, eh? So I kept throwing myself into photography, forcing myself to pick up my camera, and feeling dead inside. I didn't want to quit and do something else, even though it was painfully obvious to everyone else that I was spinning my wheels. Know what my major problem was? I was never a good photographer. Oh, I could take a good picture, but I didn't have the personality or the will to be a big-time shooter. I wasn't in love with the art, and it showed. I spent all that time trying to fit a round peg into a square hole in some kind of bloody-minded show of, I don't know, stubborn desperation. I may not have been very good, and I may have hated it, but I was not going to be a quitter.

All this time, I was doing something in my spare time that I was good at. I was writing. Mostly game related stuff, specifically stuff for Palladium. I had a bunch of ideas, I was good at it, was collaborating with other writers, and it felt good. I couldn't make the jump, though. It's like I've got this thing where I have to do shit the hard way, where I ignore what I'm good at so I can suffer through something I'm not good at/don't like so that, I don't know, prove something maybe. Anyway, after a few years of therapy and struggling to get my shit together, I finally jumped. I packed up my camera, told all my photo colleagues I was out of the business, and threw myself into words. 

I was off and running with Robotech. I mean, hell, writing primary continuity for a cartoon I watched religiously as a kid and influenced a lot of my creativity? Sign me up. So I wrote Robotech. And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I realized, you know what, I'm good at this. I was a staff writer and a lead developer for Robotech for almost three years. I'd finally found it, I was a writer. I could do it, I could write whole books. I could conjure awesome from thin air (and I don't care what the Robotech nerds say, powered suits in Southern Cross are awesome), and all I wanted to do was write. I collected a bunch of writing books, started to develop my voice, and decided that what I wanted, more than anything else, was to write for a living. Didn't matter if it was game stuff, although that's what I really wanted, but I wanted to make a career with words. The more I learned about the trad-games industry in particular and in the writing business in general, the more restless and stressed out I became in my job.

Now, the peculiarities of Kevin Siembieda's personality and business practices are well known around the business, and I'm not interested in airing dirty laundry, but it quickly became obvious that staying with Palladium was going to get me nowhere. How was I going to get into the industry at large and grow my career working for a company that was proud of the fact that it was "outside" of the industry and was blaming its loss of revenue and market share on everything except decisions made within the company? It smacked of, "everyone's fault but mine," and I knew that that way was madness. I chafed, and drank perhaps more than was called for, and decided that something needed done.

So I started looking around, putting a resume and some writing samples together, testing the waters by asking friends I'd made in the industry. It was ugly out there. Writers are a dime a dozen, especially in the trad-games industry where every gamer who's ever run a game thinks he's a genius writer just waiting to be discovered. Sales were down all over the industry, the economy was in the shitter, and everyone was scared. I figured I'd bide my time, make some contacts, and keep honing my craft. Then, bang, got a call on a Monday morning in September telling me I was out of a job. Now, I don't care what anyone says, a lay-off is a lay-off. "Temporary" or not, I was now unemployed. I'm not gonna lie, I was pissed. I'd lost a job, I'd lost Robotech, and honestly, I felt like I'd lost my entire raison d'etre. Even though I'd been quit in my heart for months, and I was already setting the foundation for a change, I was still crushed. Standing there in my hallway, staring at my phone in disbelief, I decided that I couldn't bank on some vague promise of being rehired "when sales pick up, maybe." I didn't have any faith that that day would come, so I jumped. Again. 

Now it's eight months later. I've got a baby, I'm doing work, good work for Fantasy Flight, and things are generally good save for a mountain of debt and a general unease about the future. You know what, though? It's not easy. Not the writing, although that's braining and braining is hard work Gentle Readers, what's hard is the rest of the life. Freelancing, no matter how you dress it up, is being essentially professionally unemployed. Days when I'm hot, when I'm pounding out five-thousand words a day, I feel bullet-proof. Then I lay awake in bed worrying. I worry that I'm not good enough. I worry that I'm not working hard enough. I worry that I'll let down my wife, my daughter, myself. I worry about how to pay down debt and put a little aside for emergencies. The work I do with FFG is not only challenging and fulfilling, but it's good for my emotional state, too. My therapist certainly helps as well, very much so. I don't know what I'd do without her. 

Thing is, it's not enough. I need more. More work, more exposure, more money, more confidence, more of everything. What I need less of is fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection, fear of living my life. So I write, and I write and I write and I write and I send out resumes and I make follow-up calls and send shitloads of emails and swing between feeling awesome and wanting to throw myself off a bridge. I really don't want to come off like a crybaby, or an entitled little shit, but sometimes I wish I could catch a break. You know? Sometimes I wonder if any of this has been the right decision. I'm a good writer, but is it enough? Should I just forget trad-games and focus on other fiction or non-fiction work? Should I just say fuck it and get a job at Home Depot? Some days the answers to those questions are easier to answer than others, and this is one of those days where the answers are hazy at best.