My blindness to the difference between creating at the keyboard and formatting a document came from all the business writing I was doing. In 1997, I’d made a career change from server administration to software development. I’d begun coding, first on Lotus Notes platforms, and then on Java. By the turn of the century I’d switched jobs and was lead developer at a Fortune 500 company. One of my first assignments was writing an RFP, or Request for Proposal.
You have to understand, at this point in my life, I’d been building my own computers from parts for almost a decade. And even though I’d just purchased one from Gateway, that didn’t mean I didn’t keep upgrading parts of it. A new hard drive (and reinstall) here, a new video card there. Modem too slow? Install a faster one. No network card? Let’s add one. Buy a SCSI scanner; install a SCSI card to run it. That’s the way you did things back then. USB as a standard interface didn’t exist.
My original plan was to get an English degree, become a high school English teacher, and write novels on the side. By my junior year (after three years of taking secondary education classes), I was sent into a local high school to observe, and what I observed was that I didn’t want to be a high school English teacher. I dropped the secondary education minor required to become a State-certified teacher and started taking computer classes in my senior year. There wasn’t enough time to get a minor in Computer Science and still graduate when I wanted to, but it had been enough to land me my first job out of college. My first job was for a small computer consulting firm called MC Systems of NJ, Inc.
I grew up in Wildwood, NJ, a tourist town complete with all the trappings: a beautiful beach with white, powdery sand, restaurants, a boardwalk with rides, water parks, arcades, and games. As such, it was never all that hard for a local like me to find a summer job. By the end of my junior year of college, I’d been working summer jobs for 8 years; most recently as the driver of the Chilly Willy Ice Cream truck. By then, I finally saved up enough “extra” money to buy a new computer—this time, one that was top-of-the-line.
The first word processor I ever used extensively was WordPerfect, in high school. I’d write articles and my serialized story for the school newspaper, papers when I could (since I didn’t own a computer), and anything else I had a chance to write, since the experience was so much better than the typewriter I had at home.
Some writers prefer writing their novels out longhand, in notebooks. I’ve never understood people who prefer writing on pen and paper. Maybe I’m weird, but the idea of doing any serious writing by pen—and then having to type it later—has never worked for me. I suppose that means I was born at the right time.
Over the weekend, I started shipping books. This was something I’d planned for, and of course I wanted to maximize my efficiency in several ways:
Release day is finally here. Today, I go from “aspiring” novelist to novelist. There’s a huge leap between “aspiring” and what comes after that. One is a dream or a possibility; the other is the reality, which may not correspond to all the hopes and dreams that go with “aspiring.”
There’s a phrase people use when talking about a task they can do competently: if it were easy, everybody would do it. Publishing, and particularly self-publishing, is like that. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can try taking the easy (and expensive) path: pay some service to do everything for you. I’m publishing my first novel, so you could argue that I don’t know what I’m doing, since I haven’t done it before. But paying a service to do it for me is not my way, as anybody who knows me will attest.
I’m old enough to remember (maybe it’s still happening; I don’t know) the competition among Anonymous Cowards (that’s the default un-authenticated user name) to get first post on any Slashdot article. Well, when you have your own website, it’s rather easy since you have no competition. That doesn’t make me any less excited to be writing my first blog post on my new website.