When I grow up...

When I was in my last year of high school I was torn between getting a degree in science to have a successful career or a degree in english to be a starving writer. The logical, practical side of me (probably 99% of me, I might have been born on Vulcan) chose science, and picked the subject in which I'd received the highest mark, chemistry since the first year of university in a science programme is the same regardless of your major subject. I ended up at the University of Guelph's wonderful interdisciplinary physical sciences MPC^2 (Math, Physics, Chemistry & Computing) programme, sadly dismantled after only a few years. There I remembered that computers were my real best subject, much to the chagrin of the chemistry, mathematics and physics professors; especially my math professor who told me, now rightly I know, that I should have taken math as everything else is a derivative or specialization of math. I quickly realized that he was right and that university level chemistry and physics is just applied theories surrounded by math. Rather than do the right thing and follow him to the math department I saw that computer science is much more practical so once again, that side of me won over and here I am today, a software developer for MKS Inc. I took some required and elective biological science and english (including SF) courses, plus psychology and philosophy of science, one of my favorite all-time courses. Through all this I mostly forgot I wanted to be a writer.

One of my favorite authors is Gene Wolfe. He wrote a sort of fifth book for his tetrology, The Book of the New Sun, called The Castle of the Otter (in the same style of title as the other four). The book was about The Book and writing in general. It was good advice to me on who should be a writer. At the time, I was not one who should have written according to his advice; I agree with that. He said unless you find yourself unable to stop writing, you aren't a writer. If you have to fight for every word, you won't make a good writer. So aside from programming code, emails and that sort of thing I haven't written much in ages.

Recently I got the writing bug again and I've got it bad, almost late for work today trying to put thoughts to paper. I always used to write down ideas for stories that were cool but I'd start writing and after a paragraph or two I'd be done. The ideas were too small and had almost no room for expansion whatsoever. My new idea is much better and I've already written ideas and even some preliminary work in longhand to the tune of several pages. I will start typing it soon as I write so little in longhand these days that I get a hand cramp quickly while I'm used to typing for 8-12 hours a day.

Wow, I think I may have the title for it! That is often the hardest part.

I have some grand notions of having it published in Analog or Asimov but looking at the pay scales I don't know if it would be worth it. Perhaps I'll publish it here instead in serials to see if anyone will actually find it and/or read it.

Harry