I turn nearly everything I do into a job. It’s a really old, really bad habit.

A Tale of Two Mikeys

My “day job” is in software. Even there, I started doing it as a hobby, though I was so young at the time it’s probably the same way anyone finds their way to a career.

In high school we had one of those “What do you intend to do after high school?” sessions. Teenaged Mike had a plan: B.Eng, followed by M.Eng, and maybe then a Ph.D.

Theatre: Part I

But in my last couple of years of high school I also discovered theatre, and that threw a big ol’ wrench into my life plans. I loved theatre. The people I met in the arts were quirky and brilliant and beautiful, and I felt for the first time like I could create things that people might love. My heart yearned to ditch the life plan and pursue performance. I even went so far as to apply and get accepted to the Fine Arts program in Corner Brook.

Engineering

But my 18-year-old nerve failed me, and I ended up going ahead with the engineering plan instead. At the time the first year of the engineering program was a general studies year, so my first-year dalliance didn’t lose me any time at all. I’d immersed myself as much as I could into the arts, but I’d still done math and physics and chemistry right alongside them, and I was ready – academically, at least – to return to what I’d always expected for myself.

A semester of engineering, however, introduced me to a thought that simply hadn’t occurred to my young mind previously: I didn’t know what an engineer did. The nuts and bolts of it, and the levers and switches too, I mean. The day to day. The life I was choosing.

So I went to the head of the discipline I’d intended to enter – Electrical Engineering – and he tried to explain the job to me. I can’t remember, now, what we talked about. But it left me unsatisfied.

Today, a quarter century later, I can see that I should have gone back right then and tried to do theatre. It would have killed me, whether by way of drugs or poverty or the cancer that came around in my early 30s, which I could not possibly have afforded to treat if I’d become a starving artist.

But it would have been right for me, for the person I was then. There was a life in the arts, a could-have-been.

Half-Assed Science

Instead I left engineering and pursued a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Physics. These together felt like safe bet. Physics felt pure and full of possibility, and it didn’t hurt that my friends and I had devoured James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science and half a dozen other barely-accessible popular physics books. And computer science, well. I’d been gaming since the mid-80s when my family bought a Commodore 64, and I’d been programming off and on ever since.

I stumbled a lot through that program, for reasons that aren’t really relevant here, or at least ones that I don’t think connect to what I’m writing about right now. Throughout those years, however, I spent a great deal of time onstage. First it was drama club, and then the limited dramatic curriculum at the school, then community theatre, and finally independent theatre with a meagre paycheck attached. I even spent a few hours on the periphery of a feature film, sitting in a room with people who left me in awe.

I kept stumbling for years, in and out of tech. I did some work as an extra in the Ontario film industry, then a stint as a programmer in Newfoundland. I took a second job in the summer as an actor, all the while coding my days away. I met a wonderful woman, Merrill Barreca, who brought me along for a Hail Mary of an independent production that eventually found us at Montreal’s Fringe Festival – the first Newfoundland production ever, according to the organizers. But when that was over, it was back to the code mines with me.

By this time I was practically vibrating with the dissonance of my dual existence. I made the decision to try theatre for real. I figured I could maybe force myself into a decision about who I was and what I was doing with my life.

Theatre: Part II

And so in 2005, at the well-seasoned age of 27 years old, almost a decade after I’d chickened out, I found myself back in that Fine Arts school, taking the proverbial road not travelled. In the first semester I got hit with three big life events – an injury, a death, and a financial blow – that, in toto, made it nearly impossible to continue.

But continue I did; after a decade of waffling it was going to take more than that to shake me.

The program was often exactly what I’d hoped it would be, thrilling and insightful and difficult in a way that set my spirit afire. I was lonely, an old man amidst youngsters and a career nerd amongst lifelong artists, forever a hanger-on. I made mistakes with women. I made mistakes with myself. I fell back into old, bad patterns.

But the thing that destroyed me, ultimately, was that injury I got my first semester. I had one surgery, then another, then an infection that dogged me for almost a year, in the process putting an abrupt end to my first (and only) full-time acting gig. Somewhere in there my love of theatre came up hard against the reality of my situation. I made the hard call, and I left the program.

That departure broke something in me as far as theatre was concerned, and it’s been very scarce in my life since then. Before I left, I wrote a play and took the first few days of a creative writing course, and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. And like I said, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead of cancer right now if I’d kept at it, so, you know. Bright side of life and all that.

And besides: I did the thing! I got to have it both ways! It just didn’t work out.

Exeunt

But the decision to leave meant that for a long time I carried a lot of baggage from just those few days of my life. I’ve been more or less at peace with it for over a decade now, I’ve built a career and a life elsewhere. I’ve been programming professionally for over 20 years, and I’m not terrible at it. Sometimes it’s rewarding, but, like most jobs, I suspect, it often falls short of fulfilling me, of giving me purpose and joy and all that.

The theatre thing would probably just be an extended version of the usual “halcyon days of youth” story, if that was all there was to it. But as I said at the beginning, I have a bad habit, and habits…well, they’re habitual.

Comics

I started writing and drawing comics back in my sciencey days of university. I didn’t take it seriously at the time. I drew a few pieces for the school paper, and wrote the first part of a pretty bad story with a lot of bad tropes in it. I’ve had occasional spurts of intense artistic practice over the years – classes, life drawing, draw-every-day type practice, and a good bit of writing (more on that shortly) – but I’d never really approached it with a professional seriousness.

After I left theatre school, I started taking comics more seriously. I wrote a 100-or-so-page script (first of three!) for a story called Old Man Hero and I spent almost $1000 on commissions from various artists for vignettes from that story. I dreamed in vain of finding an artist who might be interested in joining forces and tag-teaming our way into the professional world of sequential art…

Tabletop Games

Since high school, too, I’d been into various kinds of tabletop – Warhammer, board games, a wide variety of RPGs. Always, always playing these games sparks a desire to make my own. I write settings. I create minigames. I’ve written chunks of worlds and campaigns that never got to the table.

At one point I even planned out a “party DM” business based on over-the-top sessions with props and sound effects and smoke machines (oh my!). Think Dimension 20, if Brennan Lee Mulligan was way more of a dork and the world was happy to ignore him.

Hell, I even spent a year making a hybrid card/boardgame, Mechanisms. Took it to an event, printed it up in real life, all that fun stuff. Figured I could sell it, maybe start myself a second career…

Let’s Not Forget: Video Games

I’ve played video games as long as I can remember, starting with our family Atari 2600 when I was a tiny and deeply introverted boy. At 45, I continue to play, when I have time, on my PS4, my phone, my PC, and my shiny new Steam Deck. But sooner or later I find myself wanting to spend less time playing games and more time making them.

I founded Perfect Minute Games to make things I want to play. I founded Gamedev NL (the immediate precursor to GDNL) to try to build up a local game development community. Games, like theatre and film, are a multi-disciplinary art, and so making them demands a great deal of time. I teach myself new skills and work extra hours so I can save up tiny sums of money so I can hire artists so I can produce something of value…

See what I mean? They all end up the same place – big commitments to something that was SUPPOSED TO BE FUN, DAMMIT.

Writing (See? I Told You It Was Coming!)

Writing might be the closest thing I’ve had to a hobby. I remember doing it as a kid, but it never really meant anything to me at the time. I met an actual writer-and-editor-in-the-offing, Lee Burton, in my high school years, and I think that’s where it started to change for me; since then I’ve written maybe a couple dozen stories, a play, a number of newspaper articles, and the various things mentioned previously in this post.

Several years ago now, I decided to finish a novel. Lee helped me pare my focus down to one single project, and I realized that unlike all this other nonsense, writing was something I could do entirely on my own. I’d had the key concept for the book in mind since I was in my early 20s, though at the time it was just a short story trending towards flash fiction. The core notion was simple: What if music was magic? And what if the language of the book itself was musical, or at least full of sounds and rhythms and all the trimmings? How delightful! How Tolkienesque!

So I wrote myself a novel that weighed in, at its height, over 140,000 words. I wrote it like a siege campaign, a thousand words over lunch, five hundred in a pre-supper sprint, a full two thousand or more in those rare, precious stretches when I had both time and energy to spare. I took notes. I took writing classes and joined writing communities and generally made a nuisance of myself. I built a world.

It took years.

I’ve since finished a first and second draft of the book, and attempted three more. Then I parked in a folder in Google Drive to gather binary dust.

Still, it’s the closest thing I have to a complete, and it might well be the only book I ever complete. Writing’s easy compared to most of my pursuits – you don’t need anything but a facility with words and some time – but it needs a lot of time, not days or weeks but months and years.

Over such a long period of time it becomes…a job.

No More Jobbies

I don’t know if this habit of mine ruins everything, or if taking a thing a bit too seriously is just part of my process for such things. But the last few years I’ve slowly eased back on my commitments and projects. I want more time for myself, and part of that is doing fewer things with less intensity. I want to be able, sometimes, to savour the journey more than the destination.

I want hobbies, not jobbies.

It’s probably not a formula for success. But success in these things isn’t really the point. The reason theatre haunted me for a decade was as much about how it stretched me and showed me things – both in myself and beyond myself – that I never recognized before. It showed me ways to be happy I didn’t even know were possible. It let me connect to people I might never have known otherwise, people who have brought untold riches into my life.

I think maybe all I really need is space to play, an outlet for the creative spark, like a small, unpredictable geyser at which I can, now and then, discover some small shiny idea.

These pursuits of mine, for all that they take up my time and energy and money, earn their keep. They keep me sane. They give me bright little bursts of joy.

What else can a fella ask for, really?