Time is a cruel beast. A big garage cleanup brought back some memories of a summer job I had 30 years ago.

I had an opportunity as a young man to work for a summer at Steve Jackson Games. It was down in south Austin off of Oltorf and I remember it being quite a hike during rush hour traffic from where I lived up north.

My work hours were in the evening and into the night as I functioned as the "scanning boy". I would take pencils and inked art, scan them into a scanner, and clean off the pencil marks in Photoshop. Probably Photoshop 1.0 or something very early like that. I would put the digital files into a hard drive that would be accessed by the digital colorist during the day hours.

His name was Jeff Koke. I haven't talked to him in 30 years and he wouldn't remember a lowly scanning boy like me. BUT I've watched his career from afar all of this time. He's a design god and created identities for brands that we've all seen and used. Kind of fun to "I knew a guy before ..." thinking about the stuff he's done.

One of the perks that I had at the job was that Mr. Jackson himself would work into the late evening and night. Sometimes I'd get access to him and his brain as he was in his office. We were the only ones there. I can't remember anything in particular we talked about, but he was the first guy I met that made a career almost exclusively from his creativity.

I'd met many authors before, but this guy is a world builder. Not only building worlds but also the rules that the world operated in. Very cool. It left an imprint on me and I still thrive to be a world builder myself. Maybe subliminally his card games drove me to work on digital card games for Major League Baseball or even the ambitious NFT game with Peelander Yellow called MONMONMON.

So I got a book credit for my work that summer. I'm sure I helped on many more books but was there long enough to help this one and Lilian was kind enough to get my name in it. And spell it correctly.