NickCummings.com

So here’s the deal: I recently became unemployed after working six months as a legal assistant in the hopes of kindling a passion for legal work and, eventually, maybe even encouraging myself to apply to law school and make something of myself.

It dawned on me that that’s not the life I want for myself. For better or worse, I’m not happy unless I’m working in some creative fashion. I only feel good about myself when I’m staying up all night working on a layout, or writing about whatever comes to mind (hence this blog), or sketching ridiculous cartoons I wouldn’t dare share with anyone, or…you get the point.

I’m currently living in Eugene, Oregon, which doesn’t have a whole lot going on except for:

• An awesome library
• An abundance of affordable, healthy, local, organic food
• Plenty of bike paths
• A totally awesome girlfriend who’s got my back, even if she thinks I’m ridiculous

With that in mind, here’s the deal.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to dive head-first back into Flash. With the help of Lynda.com (the best learning tool I’ve ever used outside of a classroom), I intend to teach myself everything I can about making games with Flash with the eventual goal of…well, it’s hard to say. I want to be a game designer, and dammit, now’s the time.

I’ve got this nagging worry in the back of my mind that this is just me trying to justify slacking off and being an unemployed layabout, but I’m pretty sure the opposite is true. For the first time ever, I have no obligations aside from feeding, sheltering and clothing myself. This is the time to hunker down and learn everything I can and start creating things to share with people. I have no idea where it’ll lead me, but frankly, I don’t care. For the next few months, my life is my own and this is what I’m choosing to do with it.

There’s one cardinal rule I love breaking as a writer, and that’s editing. Maybe it’s just the way I approach a first draft, but I get so energized just seeing where my prose takes me that to go back and revise it seems almost criminal at times. Clearly it’s a necessary process for producing something polished and presentable, but it’s hard to liberate yourself to write what you want when you’re just thinking ahead to the next step where you’re going to go back and eviscerate everything. It’s hard to focus on step one when all you can think about is step two.

The next few months are going to be all about step one. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes in a general sense, but if you’d like to keep up with all my notes, sketches, observations, and other game-related details, check out nickplaysgames.tumblr.com. And, of course, I’m still actively working on Silicon Sasquatch for the more high-brow gaming stuff — and if such a thing doesn’t exist, we’re doing our damnedest to make it real!