Yesterday, I got to do something that is so amazing and unexpected, I can’t believe it was real … and I have to keep all the details of it a total secret for a very long time.
That seems to be the story of my life these days. I’m not complaining, but everything I work on has this huge list of NDAs and terrifying agreements that make me responsible for millions of dollars in damages if I give up the secrets. Seriously. I had to sign an NDA recently where I affirmed my understanding of the value of the information I would be holding in my head, and that I further understood that if I leaked this information out of my head before a certain period of time, I agreed to be responsible for a minimum of a million dollars per bit of information, up to several millions of dollars. I was so afraid of something happening when the materials were out of my hands, I destroyed them — first in a shredder and then in a fire — to ensure that nobody could somehow dig through my trash for some reason and go through the improbable and difficult series of events necessary to put me on the hook for the millions of dollars that I do not have. It was a little weird, in retrospect. And don’t ask me what it was, because I won’t say.
This is pretty awesome, because it means that I get to work on projects that a lot of people are really excited about, including me! This is also a bummer, because one of my first loves, narrative nonfiction writing, doesn’t have as deep a well to pull from as it has for the last decade that I’ve been writing it almost every day.
Over a decade. Wow. That’s …. a thing.
I’ve been telling Anne that I need to take some time away from my on-camera work, so I can focus on storytelling and creative writing. I have lots of ideas that can be turned into things, and there’s a very good chance I’ll get to pitch at least one of those things to a comic publisher this week. Fingers crossed. I’m also working on narrative fiction pitches for Geek & Sundry, Nerdist, and Legendary Digital, so I can do that sort of thing in addition to the games and the hosting and stuff that’s been most of my professional life for the last couple of years. These are all first world problems, I know, and they are good problems to have, on balance.
I have stories to tell. I just need to find a way, and find the time, to tell them.
