Leave the Work at Work
Or: The story of more unexpected delays
Luck of the Draw
I should start out by saying that I’m incredibly lucky. I have a film degree. I’ve wanted to make movies for a living since I was 9, and I’ve been doing not that for my entire professional career. Why does that make me lucky? It’s lucky because I sort of fell into a backup that I still enjoy. Maybe not as much, but there are a lot of people out there who hate their jobs, and I don’t. See? Lucky.
But here’s the thing, I’m not going to lie to you (or to myself, for that matter). If someone from Netflix1 approached me tomorrow and said “Hey, we hear you have some ideas,” I’d seriously entertain their offer2.
I don’t want to write software for the rest of my life. I will, but I don’t want to. I want to tell stories. I want to entertain people. That’s what drove me to Substack in the first place. This platform may not be as flashy as a WordPress blog, or a MailChimp newsletter, but there’s one thing it does really well. It lets me write.
I’ve built and maintained a lot of WordPress themes both for personal projects and at my previous job with 5 Stones, and I don’t mind doing it, but I always end up spending more time in the code than I do in the editor. Substack gives me a chance to pull my head out of the weeds of PHP and JavaScript and focus on the bit that really matters to me.
The Hard Truth
If you've been around long enough, you've probably heard mention of Andak Media—or maybe the
. Andak is something I've been sort of passively involved in for a while—largely because the guys running it are all my gaming buddies, and they tend to talk shop when we get together to play Fallout or DnD.Recently, amid the ongoing development of Frontier, my participation became a little bit more official. With that came some assigned tasks that I didn’t necessarily expect.
Among those is the Andak Media website3. WordPress. Exhilarating. Six(ish) months after I shut down my WordPress site for the Aluron content and redirected everything to Substack, I’m back building a theme instead of writing.
This isn’t what I signed up for. I write code for a living. When I clock out, I want to be done writing code, because every minute I spend writing a WordPress theme is a minute that I’m not writing stories. I don’t want to do that anymore. I like WordPress4, but I don’t want to develop for WordPress.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Ok, so now that I’ve dropped that bombshell, where do we go from here? The important thing here is that I’m going to power through, and I’m going to take this project seriously. I’m going to give it the same treatment I’d give any ticket at work. Well structured data, clearly documented and organized code.
It might mean putting my passion projects on hold a little longer, but here’s the thing: I believe in Andak Media (I’m cheesy, ok? Deal with it). There are some big things coming, and the guys involved with it are among the most creative people I know.
I’m putting everything I have into this website, because if this thing goes the way we all want it to (and I’m confident that it will), then this could be the very thing that allows me to leave the work at work and get back to telling stories. This website that I don’t want to build could be the last one that I have to build.
Or Disney, or HBO, or Marvel, etc.
Provided they pay their writers, anyway.
Sorry. No link yet. It’s still under construction, remember?
Sorry, Jacob. Just under 5 years at 5 Stones, and you just couldn’t break me of that.