#layed off

Okay, first up is DragonCon. My husband dyslexicoedr and I drove to Atlanta at the end of August to enjoy our big con of the year: DragonCon! It's our big vacation and this year was the biggest yet! It was a long drive from Austin to Atlanta, but we had a great time, as we always do. This year we kicked it with our friends soupgoblin, his brother Mike, and our pal Zyxxs. Also along for the ride was neogeen and their husband. Oh my gosh, it was amazing!!

We didn't stay in one of the host hotels, which turned out to be a good choice. We did stay close enough to walk and boy did we walk all weekend @___@ We ate kick ass food, saw kick ass costumes, and attended some excellent panels! The best part was actually getting to chill with our friends in the common area in our hotel. We played lots of board games and I got to do a lot of doodling (which will be posted later). My husband also ran a KICK ASS Werewolf: the Apocalypse game with the bunch of us. Only a couple of us had actually played W:tA before, but the others caught on quick and we had probably the most perfect one shot game I've ever played. IT WAS AMAZING!! Players were amazing, characters meshed perfectly. WOW!

It was also super exciting for me because I have been a huge fan of neogeen's work for SO LONG! Getting to draw with them and absorb all their art wisdom and share a little of my own was just...THE BEST! Oh gosh, I wish I could spend a whole week absorbing the inspiration that is Neo! I got to see Neo's sketches and I showed off a big chunk of my own art (that I dragged all the way from Texas in the back of the car >___>). To say I was inspired would be an understatement!

So yeah, DragonCon was the perfect vacation I was expecting. SO AMAZING! Er, but it was predicated by some bad news. About an hour before we left work to go on vacation (that's not even an exaggeration, by the way), our boss at Minicore Studios sat us down and gave us some bad news. The game our company had spent the past few years working on was...not doing well. Bad enough that we had almost run out of money. Which meant the company had to essentially lay off most of its 11 employees. We'd have about a week and a half of work once we got back from vacation...and that was it. No more job.

Well, it wasn't the best news and not the best time to get it. Actually, it ended up being a pretty good time to get the news, it turned out. We didn't let it ruin our vacation (few things could actually manage that), but we did take that free time to make plans for our future. We were able to save a lot of the money we'd set aside for the vacation and not spend it like we'd planned. That helped A LOT.

I'm pretty sad still about the fact that Minicore pretty much collapsed. The only people left in the studio are one artist and one programmer working on Murder at Mystery Manor, the next game the studio was to make. Even the boss got cut! I don't think this is unfair and I have no hard feelings at all about what happened or the way it happened. I kinda expected something like that would happen some day. That's the danger of working for a start-up company after all. I wish our game could have turned a profit, but so far it hasn't and what had to be done was done. I wish the remaining crew the best of luck with the game their working on! I hope it gets finished because it's going to be so much fun if it is!!

So that left us in a bad spot. Both my husband and I were employed by the same studio and we went from having two incomes to...no income...at all. D: That was distressing. We made some major and immediate adjustments to our lifestyle to compensate. I opened commissions to make sure we had some cash coming in. My husband began flinging resumes at every game studio he could find. We were expecting to go on unemployment and eat $0.19 instant ramen for a month. Thankfully, that didn't happen!

Almost immediately my husband got a call from EA (who is opening up a mobile studio here in Austin) asking for an interview! HOORAY! He would be interviewing for a tech lead position! One of our co-workers from Minicore had gotten picked up at EA (he was our designer), so that was encouraging! While waiting to hear back after his programmer test, my husband got another interview with a local studio called Panic Button. They interviewed him and offered him a 3 month contract within 2 days of the interview. We were floored! They said he had less experience than they usually hired, but were willing to offer him a contract to see if he could do the job they needed him for. EA was taking its time getting back to him, so after a good long talk, my husband decided to take Panic Button up on their offer.

Less than 2 weeks after losing our jobs, my husband was back to work! :D And the studio he's now working for is AMAZING! I can't really say much about what he's doing other than that he's working on developing tools other devs will use to make console games. The depths of the awesomeness of the stuff he's doing is stuff I can't actually talk about, but let me tell you IT'S SO COOL! Neither of us ever imagined he'd be doing the kind of stuff he's doing now or working with the kind of people he's working with. Panic Button may look small but it's got some INCREDIBLE people working there and some mind blowing projects! SO COOL! He loves it and is fitting right in. We're pretty sure there will be good news at the end of his contract (when they decide if they want to keep him full time).

So where does that leave me? Well, we went over our severely revised budget and figured that my husband is making enough money at his new job that I can afford to stay home and just...freelance. Which is a freakin dream come true! I've never much liked working in an office and my social anxiety makes working with customers stressful. Also, I don't have much interest in staying in the video game industry, to be honest. The way women are treated kinda scares me and I don't really want to be part of it. Besides, I'm having a LOT of fun being an arty housewife :D

I've been taking commissions and I'm happy to say that I've had pretty steady work! It's nice to get to draw this much! I'm also taking time to start working on a Patreon for my Wanderlust Tales project. I'm going to try to get that up and running this month (more on that in a later post). I'm finally getting back to doing a lot of digital art and I really hope I can advance my skill to the next level. I feel like I've been stagnant for a while now and just need to push on through.

I'm also spending time getting my house in order and that makes me super happy. I love organizing and cleaning *___* My house is looking so much better now than it has before! Also, I get to spend a lot more time with my dogs :D Perhaps the best part of losing my job is that I suddenly have time and energy to EXERCISE! Oh man, I was doing NONE of that when I worked in an office! The hour long drive to work in the morning and then the hour long drive back in the evening was draining my energy. Plus the office I worked in had pretty much no natural light :< Now I get to go outside and walk my dogs and I've started going swimming 3 times a week. I'm so much more active now! And my mental and physical health are improving as a result! I love it! I have been wanting to get into better shape for a while now and I finally have an opportunity! I'm also eating better since we're not eating out all the time. I'm even learning to cook :D Whoo hoo!

So, to wrap this all up, a lot of shit has changed this past month. I turned 30 this September and life changed all of a sudden. Wow! And while I'm going to miss all my co-workers and the projects we worked on at Minicore, I'm looking forward to what the future will bring. Last year I was a wreck of anxiety worrying about losing my job. This year I lost my job so I don't have to worry about that anymore! I'm very optimistic about life going forward. We've even started talking about having a baby next year, so that's exciting! It's about damn time, too XD