Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Life is What Happens When You're Making Other Plans!

Life has been crazy lately.  What else is new, right?  Between work, weather, moving, schooling, family, and everything else - the writing has taken a back seat for awhile.  (Sigh.)

Even though I'm currently not actively writing, I'm still writing!  At least in my head.  I still come up with ideas, formulate plots, create scenes, and build characters.  I can't help it!  I have new short stories to write and new scenes to add to my everlasting book project.  I will say that my iPhone has been a great help.  I've been using an application called "Writing Toolkit" for keeping track of characters, plots, and story ideas.  DocsToGo has also been a good addition to my iPhone.  I keep my stories there for reference.

Being a writer is in my being.  I sometimes become frustrated that others don't always understand that.  I wrote when I was young, I wrote songs when I was a performing musician, and I still write.  I've tried to analyze why.  The only conclusion that I've come to is the aspect of always wanting to create something.  Which is also why I'm a programmer.  I've always stated that I'm a lifer instead of a jobber.  I code because it's a part of me.  I write because it's a part of me.  I find satisfaction with giving life to software applications.  I find satisfaction with giving life to characters, scenes, and stories.  When I say, "Hey, check this out!" with a cool piece of code, and someone else agrees that it's pretty cool - it makes me feel good.  When someone reads one of my stories and I get a favorable response - I glow for a long time!

Quite a while back, I wrote a story called "Freedom From Paradise".  I used a few of my friends as primary characters in the story, projected in a new future situation.  In a sense it was just an exercise in characterization and dialog.  I gave one of my friends a copy of the story when it was completed.  Several weeks later he went camping with his friends and family and the story was read aloud at their campfire one night.  I heard from multiple people about their enjoyment of the story.  That was one of my favorite moments about being a writer.

Then there's the time I wrote an article for Computerworld Magazine, comparing Windows 95 versus OS/2.  That was one of the most scariest times of my life as a writer.  Thousands of hate emails from the OS/2 community for giving Windows 95 a half star lead.  But, in afterthought, it made an impact and I did my part in relaying a truthful comparison.

I guess I'm starting to babble here.  Overall, just because I currently don't have time to write, I'm still writing.  Because - I'm a writer!