Living in Austin, Texas with my father was a great thing for me. It allowed me to ease into adulthood in a way very different from heading straight to college. Working in an ER, I gained a perspective on life that school could not give me. I wasn’t mature enough for college, anyway. I was having too much fun not having homework. Homework was the one reason that I didn’t do well throughout my scholastic life leading up to that point. I’d do fine in class, in fact many times I’d participate when my classmates wouldn’t, but when I wasn’t forced to sit down and apply myself to my studies, I didn’t do it at all. Having a job that allowed me to put my time in, and then leave it all behind when my shift was up was something that I enjoyed very much.
Unfortunately, this was also the least creatively active phase of my life. I think that I eventually started tinkering with a story using Dregr, Loq, and Tyna, but it never really came to any sort of fruition. The most beneficial thing that came from my time in Austin was probably my familiarity of and proficiency in using Photoshop. I had seen and even used it a little before moving, but my experience was limited as I didn’t even have my own computer, let alone a copy of Photoshop to work with. That changed when I got my own PC. I developed a passion for the software and the things that I was able to do with it.
I liked it so much that I was convinced that I wanted to make a career out of using my skills as an artist. I had my future pegged as a game designer/computer animator. By this time, Martin had moved to Florida and was working on a film and video degree. My Mom and Step Dad, having heard the career path that I wanted to follow, decided to buy me a ticket to visit Martin in Florida. They enlisted Martin to arrange a tour of the school that he was attending. When I arrived in Florida, it was like old times again, except better because there were no parents to wake up with our late night video game playing or movie watching. The tour of the school must have been funny to watch because I didn’t stop smiling the whole time. They had all these cool toys and I was going to get to play with them, or at least I thought I was. I had a great visit with Martin and arrived back in Austin energized and ready to get moving on my future.
I didn’t end up attending that school, though, and it’s just as well. In the end, although he gained the knowledge he would need to make our project become a reality, Martin didn’t seem to think that the education he got there was necessarily worth the time and money that it cost him. This may be something that he told me to make me feel better about considering other schooling options, I don’t know. It would have take a lot of money to go there, and I hadn’t saved enough to even consider going. So, I continued working in Austin and looking at different schools.
Martin and I actually didn’t talk on the phone very frequently, so when we did talk, the conversations would usually be massive updates. There is one call that I remember the content of very well. Martin informed me that he had written a script for a Star Wars fan film. It used our characters and he wanted to know if I could come back to Pittsburgh (where he had since moved back to) for a month or so to portray Loq. I did my best not to let on, but I was very saddened by this because I knew that I couldn’t afford to be away from work for that long. Additionally, I felt somewhat betrayed because I was given every impression that I’d be the one that wrote the story. Even then, I knew that I had dropped the ball by not significantly contributing to the project for two years, but deeply entrenched expectations can be painful to let go of, no matter how inappropriate they are. To be honest, I don’t think that I even understood how important this project was to Martin. For me it was just a hobby that I enjoyed working on and thinking about, but for Martin it was a product that had yet to be completed, and waiting on me to uphold my end of the bargain, understandably, was no longer an option. I told Martin that I didn’t think that I would be able to make it back for that long. Understanding that he would have to find someone else to fill the roll, I asked him if he would change the name of the jedi character. Even if I hadn’t gotten a specific story down yet, I had a very specific image of the characters, and I wanted to protect Loq. In my mind, Martin was always Dregr, and I was always Loq. I think Martin understood and he agreed to change the name.
That conversation was the first time that I felt significantly detached from the project. Though I agreed to help in any way that I could, Martin was now the driving force. I had only myself to thank for the situation, but it was hard to see that at the time. It felt like I had been creating characters and formulating possible plots for almost three years, and now someone else was going to beat me to press. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that was exactly what was happening, but it was hard to admit that it was due to my own inaction. Selfishly, I distanced myself from the project to a degree, though I tried to convince myself that I had been pushed out. I still had an interest in being a major player, but Martin already had a plan that he was ready to enact, and who was I to stand in the way of the progress of my best friend.
This concludes tape one. Please insert side A of tape two to continue.
