There’s a long version of this story that I like to tell at conventions, maybe over beers, and that I’ll someday write down properly for my memoir. Here’s the short one.
Thirty-some years ago – fresh out of college and on a student work visa – I somehow miraculously landed a dream job as an editor and game developer at the Games Workshop Design Studio in Nottingham, England. That’s where they make legendary games like Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, which countless people around the globe play today.
While I was there, I worked on games lines like Space Hulk and Blood Bowl, among many others. I had the time of my life and made many amazing friends, including especially my roommate at the row house we found in the Meadows. You might know him as bestselling author William King now, but back then he was just my best pal Bill. As for the rest of them, well, I’d list them all and the effects they had on my life, but this is the short version.
After six months, my visa was about to expire, and Phil Gallagher – the head of the studio at the time – offered to make the job permanent. Despite that, I longed to return to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be with my girlfriend, who’d already suffered through six months of a long-distance relationship with me. She still had years to go to get her Masters in Social Work, and if I was going to be in the UK during all that, she rightly informed me that we’d have to break it off.
This was back in the pre-internet days of 1990, when things like FaceTime were dreams of science fiction and the letters I wrote to her every evening took days to make it across the ocean. Phone calls were $3 per minute. It wouldn’t last.
Even then, though – young as I was – I knew that I could always hunt down another dream job, but I’d have a hard time finding someone I loved nearly as much. I gave Phil my notice and – after an epic farewell pub crawl that began at the oldest pub in England and staggered about under a full lunar eclipse’s blood-red moon – I headed home.
I arrived back in Ann Arbor thirty years ago today – just before Valentine’s Day – and that long-ago girlfriend is now Ann Forbeck, my wife of 27 years and the mother of our five fantastic kids. My hero, my rock, and my love.
Far and away the best decision I ever made.
