Random Smatterings

I suppose that the first thing I should do after welcoming you to my blog is to beg forgiveness for making it. I have had a number of job titles, but they all boil down to software development. I sold my first program, written with my best friend at the age of 16 to a local manufacturing company in 1983. So I've been learning about and creating technology for the past 42 years without much change in appetite or enthusiasm. I still love creating new things in software and my best friend is still my best friend.

The point is that I have been worked with and even created many of the technologies and tools that people routinely use, but I use very few of them. This includes blogs. I have developed some web-based logging tools but I have never really paid much attention to them and I have never written one. This is my first...

So apologies for whatever naive state you find this in. Usually, when someone jumps on a bandwagon, they know what a bandwagon is, and they do it when it still has a band on it, and working wheels. Blogging is so old now as to be passé, but it is new to me so cheers for bearing with me.

Fiction, non-Fiction and Code

I think that programming changes the way your mind works. This is why people who are passionate about coding and who do it for a living are such strange people. Our favorite jokes are silly wordplays and puns and we look at the world like it should make sense. We categorize and identify trends and draw inferences that lead us, sometimes, to absurd conclusions. We are generally uncomfortable with the messy bits of how everything really is.

A voracious consumer of fiction in all forms, I have become obsessed with how stories are told to the point where I have lost the art of just enjoying the tale. Now, when I read or view a story, unless that story is truly well told, I lose track of it in the analysis of its structure, its presentation or composition. I have picked up bad habits, using structural cues to predict the outcome, and I have become picky, dropping most books I start after the first 50 pages because I do not care for the writing.

Knowing this about me, a friend (the same best friend I wrote my first program with), challenged me to throw my hat into the ring. I have dabbled in writing, and I have written a ton of non-fiction for my work, but every attempt to write fiction has been a false start. If you google something like "the top reasons new writers stop writing" and pick a random reason from the many results, that would likely be me. However, about a year ago, in yielding to my friend's encouragement I was able to stick with the goal of writing an entire novel. I'm not sure what was different this time, perhaps it's because I have learned patience in my old age, or, more likely, because I was inspired by a youtuber named Brandon McNulty, who suggested that you just sit down and write 30 minutes a day. That sounded reasonable to me and that is what I did.

The Blog

So this is my blog. I will use it to highlight some of my work and to talk about fiction and prose. I am not an expert. My opinions are my own and are not to be confused with well-considered analysis.