Another Hat

I now spend most of my nights and weekends sitting at a keyboard as I work on my current novel. During the weekdays, I don my work hat and sit at a different keyboard for an entirely different reason.

Not so long ago, the work I did during the weekday followed me home and I would work on it at night and all through the weekend. It was fun and it was challenging and it gave me something to do. As a salaried employee, it cost my employer nothing and, as a result, my boss loved me :)

Then I got a new boss. One who strictly impressed on me that I was not to work after hours on anything that was work-related. Period. Full stop, as they say. I was told to try working Sudoku puzzles or maybe learning how to play a musical instrument.

In a former life, I worked with a CAD system, so I turned to SketchUp where I discovered the joy of writing Ruby scripts to programmatically create geometry in R^3 space. In another former life, I designed and built digital micro-controller circuits, so I turned to playing with Arduinos for relief. They helped, but they were not enough.

Since I was about twelve years old, I have been wanting to write a book. Any book. Something to sit on the shelf with all the great authors surrounding it. Not something to sell, perhaps, but just something to look at; something accomplished.

One Saturday morning, I woke up with nothing to do and my wife suggested I could maybe write that book I was always talking about. So I began my first novel that weekend. Writing has always been a joy of mine and I've since discovered how writing fiction can become quite addictive.

I like to think that I have reached this point on my own, but the credit goes to both of my bosses ... the one at work and the one at home.