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!

So it turns out the downside to working as a legal assistant is that you don’t get many opportunities to flex your creative muscles. Outside of the rare opportunity where the shredder jams up and you’re left to improvise for a repair kit (tip: turns out pliers are probably your best bet — car keys just open up a whole new world of pain), about 98% of my workday involves regurgitating from dictation the same sort of letters, pleadings and memos from templates. The content is usually something along these lines:

• Person A (our client) wants something from Person B (Person A’s spouse, domestic partner, one-night stand, former bandmate): divorce, custody of the kids, a pre-nuptial agreement, etc.
• Person A spends a few hours telling my boss exactly why they are convinced they’re right and the other person is wrong
• My boss has me write a dozen or so letters and pleadings to file with the court that list the reasons why this is the best course of action for Person A
• Those documents are edited, reprinted, copied, faxed, mailed, hand-delivered, sent by carrier pigeon and relayed through tin-can telephones to everyone within a five-mile radius who knows the secret lawyer handshake

Being a legal assistant is reminding me just what a drag writing can be. When you’re being paid to put words to a page accurately and efficiently with no room for personal input, it’s like being an artist who’s stuck doing paint-by-numbers. A more accurate analogy might be a series of Mad Libs where the title of each story is “(Noun)’s (adj., negative) Life is Falling Apart.” That kind of sordid literature doesn’t really lend itself to fart humor and goofy characterization, which are the cornerstones of any professional writer’s repertoire.

So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I’m finding it difficult to write about much of anything lately. Unless you want to hear about my recurring nightmares involving throngs of lawyers, judgmental stares and SeaWorld, I’m out of ideas.

I know, I know. I’m lucky to have a job — any job — in this economic climate. But I’d be kidding myself if I said this is the sort of career I’d been dreaming about since I was a kid. I’m hoping that, sooner or later, I’ll find a better fit. But there’s no time like the present to get back on a more creative path.