Back in August I went part-time at my bread-winning job to actually pursue what I wanted to do for a career, which was to be a writer. Most people dream of quitting their jobs, dragging the old Smith-Corona out of the closet and pounding away, fueled by coffee and gin as they produce the great American novel. Me, I just wanted a single day to myself, where my brain wasn’t already polluted by the myriad tiny but complicated projects that make up my day job.
Thankfully, I have a wife who cares about my soul. She’s been telling me for years to find the thing that would make me happy. (Besides her, of course.) She actually quit a job many years ago for a month or so, and tried the writing life. She was good at it. But she longed for human contact and security and a little more cash to pay the bills, so she went back to her old job, and ended up being very happy for a while. She understood where I was coming from, and when I finally decided to be a tiny bit brave and take back some time for myself, she was at the top of my small pyramid of cheerleaders.
One of the things they tell you, when you want to write a novel, lose weight, or set any similar goal where failure would be mortally embarrassing, is to tell a bunch of people. I’m a chicken. I didn’t start out aiming to tell people, but they found out anyway. As I talked through the details of rearranging my work schedule, people kept asking me what I was going to do with my extra time. I’d tick off a small list of things like, improve my web development skills, learn a bit more about programming, try some dumb creative projects with glitter and ice cream sticks…maybe even write a book.
For some reason, the book was the idea that always stuck with people. It got around. Suddenly, people were coming up to me in the cafeteria going, “I think it’s so great that you’re pursuing your dream! How’s the book going?”
I really need to find a way to marshal that network for marketing when I’m done with my book.
The funny thing is, writing wasn’t really top of the list. I thought maybe I’d pursue some of the practical things first. I thought I’d work on the skills that would help me buy more bread in the end. But the world seemed to be speaking to me, and I decided to listen. I sat down with my writing box, with all the old half-formed story ideas and fragments I had on my hard drive and on backup CDs and thought about what I wanted to write. I picked one, maybe not the easiest idea to pursue, but one that I felt I could do, and do pretty well, and that I thought would have some resonance in my soul.
And I started writing it.
I was going through some old boxes of computer games the other day, and amongst my various notes on hints and cheats I found a print-out of a secret message that was contained in