I have alluded herein to being a writer. That has even brought comments, suggestions, and the idea (freely given by a wonderful person) that I use this blog as a vehicle to push my writing career along. So here is yet another post about writing, which may or may not be more interesting or better written than my previous post, that about having too many blue denim shirts.

Although I consider myself, now, to be a writer of fiction, that is almost certainly problematic. Other forms of writing, however give me a usable rationale, I believe, to say that I am a professional writer and be at least partially correct. Let’s look at a few of those before we come back to fiction.

I have written thousands of pages of non-fiction in pursuit of business goals, both mine and those of others. I have written reams of technical prose, including software and project documentation, again for myself and others. All of that has been for pay, one way or another. So I suppose that I have proven that I am a competent professional technical writer.

I am a blogger, which is to say (in my case) a short non-fiction writer, at a couple of levels. I have written hundreds of posts for my own blogs, with no thought of success or financial return. That’s not why I wrote them, nor is it why I write the posts here. I do it simply for the joy of expressing myself, of trying to say something about the world.

I also write technical columns in return for money. I’ve been doing that for quite a while, starting at itsbadbusiness.com, continuing on to BestBizWare.com, and now writing in a number of sections of the tech site Blorge.com. I don’t know what the total column count is, but I tend to write about sixty columns per month, so it is probably well over a thousand. I guess, since they are still sending money, I must be a professional blogger, another form of professional writer.

I have written a fair amount of poetry. The less said about that the better. If you wish to know why I feel that is the case, I refer you to: a frawg poem. That is fairly old, but I have not gotten much better. I am distinctly not a professional poet.

I am currently writing a non-fiction book, my first. It is about the tension between a society less than 100 years away from steam power and teams of horses, in stark contrast to a highly technical world in which technical complexity doubles every eighteen months. I have already had agents bite on that book, so I am sure it will sell. It is a salable property and idea, though it will never make anybody a lot of money. I would probably do almost as well to self-publish it.

Now we are back to the fiction. I have written two novels and begun a third. I have had a number of interested agents on the first, which is of the thriller genre, fiction written around an autobiographical core. A number if literary agents like it, but say that it is almost impossible for an unknown author to break in today because the publishing business is in such a state of upheaval. That may be true, or that may be a not unkind way to reject me. I have refused thus far to take advances on a book which may not be immediately publishable.

The second is a work of hard science fiction. It is probably salable, even today, because most of the sci-fi agents are inundated with fantasy. I refuse to write a book in which any plot problem can be solved by the sudden appearance of elves. The scarcity of my sort of work, and a backlog of older readers of Asimov and Niven, give it a good chance. Unfortunately, immediately after I finished it, the initial scientific premise was solved in a slightly different way than I wrote it, so it needs some rewriting.

The third, started but not finished, is also based on a core of fact (my father’s life), the story of three children orphaned during the depression and the later results of the scars of youth. I have, perhaps, another dozen or so treatments that would work as novels. Still, only two have been written to date, and I have not cashed a check for either. That is why I am not sure if I am a professional novelist or not. I have written novels, but have not taken money for them yet. I will leave it up to the reader to come up with a usable definition of “professional novelist” in this context.

Still, by most definitions, I am a professional writer. I probably will add a section of pages to this site for the use of self-promotion, although that is an activity at which I am abysmal. I will even consider putting some of my fiction on line, although I will need to do so only in part, and behind a membership firewall, to keep the agents and publishers happy. I know something about that, since I am also the editor in chief of a Web-zine.

So, I guess I do indeed scribble, all the time and with a certain purpose. As I said in another post, it is what I have always wanted to do. I may need some new territory to explore, though. Any suggestions?

So I called IBM and leased a 360/20 mainframe, for which I had to build a special room with water-cooling facilities. Then they came and installed what became my first personal computer. I asked the salesman about getting the programming done (I had been doing my research ) and he said it looked like he could free someone up to talk to me in five or six months. I pondered how much the lease payments would be over that period and told him to ship me the books. I had to lease another office to make room for the books.

I ran construction projects during the day, and learned to program in IBM assembler at night. About 120 days later, I had a workable project estimating system for all classes of buildings. We honed it by getting plans and having humans do the work while I fed the IBM information. When our numbers started to match, we were in the very lucrative construction estimating business.

That started my career in computers. Because the subject interested me, and was perfectly suited to computers, I developed some very interesting cryptological algorithms in my spare time. That led a small agency of the U.S. government to employ me as a contractor in Maryland, where I added search routines to pick keywords out of cable traffic to my resume. That, in turn, led to a number of years in an adjacent but much more hands-on industry in Europe and Southeast Asia.

Upon my return, I picked up on micro-computers while making a living writing software for minis. (no, not Mac Minis, mini-computers) After 1982 or so, most of my revenue came from consulting projects either writing software or managing large software projects. I rented myself, sort of an uber-expensive Kelly Girl, to small and large business: Pageant Match, Hewlett-Packard, Peninou French Laundry, General Electric, United Airlines, IBM, Visa International, Sprint, and a veritable cast of thousands.

Like legions of  techies before and after me, I burnt out on code. For a while afterward I designed and built data warehouses, drew up software architectures, and did conceptual consulting. Then I just stopped dead in the water, jumped out of my carbon-fiber racer and into a wood-hulled Mercury runabout, and started writing things other than code.

Now I write novels, non-fiction books, and columns on technical subjects, plus develop Web sites to just to keep one toe of one foot in geekdom. Now I get to think far and wide instead of narrow and focused. I get to use my right brain, which was still almost brand new after 30 years in the software development business. Life has not slowed down much, but it has become much more human.

As you have probably noticed, I started doing this video-blogging (vlogging) thing with every post. I really wanted to try it, and I really think that it can be an effective adjunctive tool to the written post. That is, if it’s well done, and I’m not sure at all that these are. They seem very rough to me. That may be be being self-critical, or they may simply suck.

So I’m looking for input. I’m trying to be very natural, so I am not over-thinking what I am going to say. Instead, I just start the application with the subject in my head, usually right after I have written the post, and start talking, trying to keep it under a minute.

So, am I rambling? Should I plan them better? Should I rehearse them? Should I hire a stunt double? I would really like some input here. I already know they are not very good so far, so you’re not going to hurt my feelings. These are never going to seem professional, because I am hardly a professional talker. Still, I would like them to be better, to more fully augment the written part of the post.

Talk to me, people…

Plurktalk is a weekly live video Webcast, ostensibly hosted by me but in truth made possible by a faithful group of attendees and occasional visits from other Plurkers. Sometimes we even talk about Plurk on Plurktalk. More often, it is the lives of the people in attendance and the vital matters of the day, with a liberal dose of (sometimes) bawdy humor.

Regulars, just now, include @pritcharddesign, @andex, @Lchamp, @HighDef, @planetKnit, @Willfall, and @nethead, who has been missing a lot lately due to family health issues, plus @bigdoc, who has had a lot of over-the-road and drunken debauchery issues. Over the time that we have been doing the show, there have been a largish number of other plurkers that have been on the show, especially when you consider the family tree of shows which preceded Plurktalk and in which I was involved.

The show occurs on Stickam, which results in some challenges. Some people have a hard time getting in sometimes, others occasionally get flung out into cyberspace in the middle of a sentence. But it is the best group videoconferencing software that I have found for free. There are windows for six live video feeds from participants and a chat window for those that choose not to be on camera or mic. The interaction level is high.

When I first started, we tried to hold the show to an hour in length. As I relaxed the format, it grew to two hours or a little more. Lately it has been running later and later. The show last night went until 2:30 in the morning, my time, for a total length of 6.5 hours. We covered approximately 4,826,081 subjects during that time and people typed or spoke about that many funny lines. We also talked about some serious things, as we almost always do.

If you would like to watch a Plurktalk, feel free to come to stickam.com/Plurktalk at about 8:00 Central time any Wednesday. If you want to participate, and you are very welcome to do so, join stickam and send a friend request to user Plurktalk. Remember to let me know how I know you. This is all free, by the way. None of it costs anyone anything, and most would agree that it’s worth the money.

For updates, watch Plurkiverse.com.

Writing is what I do, so I guess a writer is what I am…

For years and years I assembled words for people. Business words, advertising words, project words, all kinds of words. Also some poetry, some short fiction, but only listlessly. Deep down, I just wanted to write. Deeper down, I did not have the courage to abandon my day job and compromise my ability to take care of myself and the others that depended upon me.

Then, just before cancer and the treatment for same combined to kill me temporarily a couple of times, the courage came and I started to write. Maybe it was a premonition of mortality; I don’t know. I picked up a very personal story that I had left off twenty years before, and wove a novel around the core of some personal historical facts. That was my first book. It is still unsold, although I hope it does not stay that way. Still, I had written a book.

After that, I wrote another one, which also has not sold. I have a treatment for a third novel which intrigues me, but I am currently writing a non-fiction book (Moores’s Law vs. Darwin’s Law) first because I am pretty sure that it will sell. Along the way, I started writing blog posts on technical subjects on one of my own blogs.

Somehow, that turned into writing columns for money. I’m currently writing about sixty columns a month (primarily) for the Mac, iPhone, and Tech sections of the technical blog at Blorge.com. It satisfies, I suppose, a desire for approval of my writing in a paid setting; last month, people loaded my columns a total of 37,000+ times. I don’t know if that’s good or not, but it’s growing every month and they have not chased me away yet.

Some people are compulsive eaters. I am a compulsive writer. I will write anything, whenever the urge strikes, and I have a huge number of pieces of paper and text files to prove it. How can you prove that you’re a writer? It’s easy. A writer writes.