So, yeah, has it really been 18+ months since Reclaimer’s seen much of an update? I know we had those two pages in November 2011, but I almost can’t count those. They almost feel like little more than an afterthought to me at this point.
I’ve had a few inquiries this week as to my general state of affairs, which I appreciate, so I thought I would take a moment to kill two birds with one stone by providing a brief personal update while explaining the sequence of events that ultimately prevented me from getting back to Reclaimer as quickly as I wanted to. First off, I’m happy to report that my little girl, the original reason why Reclaimer went on its extended break, just passed the 18-month mark. She’s a happy, healthy, rapidly growing little creature who clearly has her mother’s energy and her daddy’s good looks. It took me a few months to adjust to fatherhood—there’s nothing quite like adding a little 7-lb helpless being to your life to completely upset things—but I adore her and I don’t regret taking the time to put the focus on my family.
At the same time Cadence arrived in our family, I was also starting to actively job hunt. I’d known for about a year prior that funding for my position with Purdue had been cut and that I would be losing my job in June 2012. That left me with just about 10 months to line up new work in a pretty rough economy. Pretty much every spare moment that wasn’t being spent with my wife and daughter was being devoted to running our farm and browsing job boards. For the rest of 2011 and most of the first half of 2012, I dropped hundreds of applications with dozens of companies. I was also landing a lot of interviews, including a number of second interviews for positions I was very interested in. Trouble was, somewhere between those interviews and an actual job offer, I was coming up short. I was getting close to my layoff date, I still hadn’t found a new job, and I still had a tiny mouth at home to feed. This is the point where panic starts to creep in. Fortunately, a friend of mine heard of my plight and asked me to send him my resume, which I gladly did. He submitted it to a position with his employer that he thought would be an ideal fit for me, and in less than a week I had a phone call. It was a technical position, writing code (SQL, Visual Basic, etc.) for one of the largest payroll companies in the US. Even better, it was a work-from-home position, something I’d dreamed about but never dared hope for. The first interview went well, and they called for a second interview. I didn’t get too excited about that, since I’d had plenty of those in the months prior that hadn’t panned out. But the day after the second interview I got called with a job offer—just two days before my job with Purdue was to end! I would actually be starting my new job in early August, so I got to collect five weeks of unemployment in the meantime and enjoy an extended “vacation” (which involved doing a lot of extra things around the farm). I spent most of my August 2012 in Jacksonville, FL (I know, tough gig, right?) training for my new job, and I’ve had the time of my life so far. It’s work I enjoy, challenging, engaging, and it lets me learn new things almost every day.
So that’s the big upheaval for the first year after my daughter was born. Once I got back from Jax in September, I started to think that I might be interested in reviving Reclaimer and trying to actually make that last, big push to the conclusion. I hate leaving stories just hanging, and Reclaimer’s been such a big part of my life for so long, I didn’t want to just forget about him. Trouble was, by this point, Bungie had already passed the Mantle on to 343i and suspended their support for Halo: Reach—including the ability to download screenshots. To make matters worse, Halo Waypoint hadn’t added that feature to their website. So I was stuck in limbo. The only other option was to set up my video capture rig again and grab screenshots that way, but my wife was now using that computer as her primary—in another room entirely. The stars were just not lining up. I had just about resigned myself to never being able to finish Reclaimer, when just a couple of weeks ago, Halo Waypoint made their announcement that they were adding a File Browser to the site, including support for Halo: Reach. I think I had my Xbox turned on about 30 seconds after I read the announcement and verified that it did, indeed, work, and my brain was suddenly in high gear again.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen some of my early thoughts on that. I was so focused on bringing Reclaimer back that for a couple of nights in a row, all I dreamed about was Reclaimer. I’d wake up in the morning with new ideas and solutions for bringing some of the story threads together, and I was scribbling a LOT of notes to myself and making flow charts to make sure I remembered how everything linked together. For the last week or so, I’ve been overhauling a lot of things here on the website, writing scripts for new pages, and using just about every spare minute I have to put together new pages and build up a queue so that, hopefully, there won’t be any further disruption of service between now and the end. As of this writing, I have a month’s worth—12 pages—of comics in the hopper with more on the way. Those answers you’ve been begging for these last few years are coming, I assure you, and I hope they don’t disappoint.
For those of you just now finding Reclaimer, welcome and make yourselves at home. Those of you who have been loyal fans all this time, thank you so much for your patience and welcome back. Look for the first new page to appear at the stroke of midnight on Monday, when we will resume our regular thrice weekly schedule.
Things are going to get interesting now…
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