On Writing

Last weekend because of my daughter’s interesting in writing, we went to a book signing event at the Seattle Public Library for Kate DiCamillo author of “The Tale of Despeareaux” and “Because of Winn Dixie”. She gave a quote from another author that stated “I hate to write, but love to have written”.

My entire young life I loved to write. I imagined great epic tales and wrote down as many as I could. One of my crowning moments was one of my HS English vocabulary classes where we were to write a story each week using the words we were studying. Most of my peers wrote 1-2 pages a week. I wrote between 10 and 15 each week. My teacher described it as my “novel”.

I went to college and originally planned to go into architecture. However, after taking several writing classes, I rediscovered my love of writing and decided to major in English. I remember writing a short sketch about a battlefield and impressing my award winning Professor.

After finally graduating many people would ask me what I was going to do with an English degree. I explained that I wanted to write. However, because of a lack of discipline and just generally being distracted with life and work, I really didn’t write much after leaving school, even though I tried from time to time.

I got married and started working in the high tech industry, first at Microsoft. Although I had the opportunity to write documentation and do some editing for the magazine website that I worked on, I still didn’t write much. One day, however, my PhD college roommate called me and wanted me to write a manual for a piece of software that he had written. This was exciting and earned me a few dollars. Later I made contact with a small newsletter that was published by the Washington Software Association and had the opportunity to write several articles for their Newsbytes newsletter.

But, life in the high tech industry gets incredibly busy (example — when we were moving our data center in Sunnyvale, CA, I worked four days straight and only got 12 hours of sleep total – half of that before the project started). So, I haven’t been able to write as much as I want. I guess that a little bit of disciple, by forcing myself to write every day is really what I need to do.

This is the reason that I decided to start this blog (which is about whatever I think about) and my technology blog (http://configt.blogspot.com) are all about. I read a lot, mostly about technology, but also about a handful of other topics (politics, business, sports and history) and often have a lot of these things running around inside my head. My goal for this blog is to get those ideas out – train myself to find my voice in my writings and discipline myself in putting my thoughts down on paper.

I hope this becomes a launching pad for more great things to come.