Storytellersunplugged

I’ve been on the road almost the entire time since my last post here on Storytellers Unplugged. I started out with a quick couple of days in San Diego at Comic-Con International, the biggest pop culture convention in the world. On that Friday (July 25), I rode up to LA for a business meeting. I flew back from there and got home around midnight.

The next morning, my wife and I packed the kids into the minivan and set off for the Northwoods for her high school reunion in Ironwood, Michigan. After that, we stayed at her family cabin near Watersmeet, Michigan, (home of the Nimrods!) for the next week and a half. From there, we drove to Madeline Island and spent five days with my mother, brother, and sisters and their families in a huge house overlooking Lake Superior.

With all that family fun behind us, we hustled back home on August 12. On August 13, I got up and drove to Indianapolis to be a guest of honor at Gen Con, this hemisphere’s largest gaming convention.

That meant I wasn’t at my desk for three and a half weeks. Toss in the prep for the trip and the recovery (I still haven’t gotten my voice back from Gen Con), and we’re looking at a full month of vacation.

Or so it would seem.

The fact is I brought my laptop with me, and I worked just about every day. Normally I’d get up and type for a bit, then have some lunch and horse around with the family in the afternoon and evening. Then, after everyone else was in bed, I’d start typing again.

This is the curse of the freelance life, the one no one tells you about when you get started. Being able to set your own hours sounds like you’re going to have plenty of time to mess around, play games, watch TV, and goof off between those frantic moments of getting work done. The reality is that once you punch in you never punch out. (Cue “Hotel California.”)

I’d intended to take some honest time off. To leave the laptop locked up in the car. Maybe to whittle away at some personal projects rather than to keep carving away at my regular work.

Then, a couple weeks before the start of the trip, a number of opportunities—great ones, the kinds of offers you can’t bring yourself to refuse—dropped in my lap. And they all had to be taken care of ASAP. Of course.

So I didn’t manage to free myself from my silicon shackles.

The trick with setting your work schedule is that the coolest, best-paying projects always seem to come in last, after you’ve already allotted every sane bit of time you have. Rather than turn down the great jobs so you can peck away in resentment at the ones you already have, you start looking at those nights and weekends. And those vacations.

In Watersmeet, out at the cabin, we don’t have running water or a phone. Our side of the lake just had electricity run out to it a few years back. Cell phone coverage is spotty. We usually have to stand by a particular tree near the beach to hold an unburbled conversation.

But the cabin next to ours has a satellite dish. With internet service. And Wi-Fi.

I was doomed.

Still, it was the kind of doom I dream about. My office became the stump of an old pine tree only spitting distance from the beach (and near enough to the neighbors to borrow their Wi-Fi). Many times, I’d sit there long enough for a family of ducks to gather in the waters around me and bathe, unaware of how close I was. More than once, I looked up to see a bald eagle swooping overhead.

One day, I finished work after midnight, and I needed to e-mail it out. I didn’t want to disturb the neighbors by stumbling along the beach in the middle of the night, so I edged my way as far as I could into the fringe of the woods separating their cabin from ours. No matter how close I moved, though, I still couldn’t get enough of a signal to get my files e-mailed out.

Then I grasped my MacBook in two hands and held it over my head. The screen shined like a lighthouse in the night, a rectangular beacon for the invisible, wireless threads of the internet I hoped to gather to it.

A moment later, I heard the zooming noise that told me my efforts had paid off. My message had been sent. My editor would be pleased. And I could stop brushing the bugs off the glowing screen.

I love my job.