As I set out on a new career as a writer, I want to share some of what I have already written and what I am currently working on.
Who am I? I am a former software test automation developer who previously taught Computer Science and Mathematics at a community college. While teaching, I wrote a textbook and instructor’s guide, as well as contributed to writing curriculum recommendations. You can read about these things on the Publications page. I started to write a couple of other textbooks, but put them aside and eventually abandoned them. I started to write a science fiction story, but put that aside, too. From time to time I would make notes about ideas I had for writing projects, but didn’t quite get around to the actual writing.
I left teaching to move back to Massachusetts and found work in the software industry, where I had even less time to write. A few years ago, I decided that I had to make writing a priority and committed to writing a novel. I went through my notes on various ideas for stories, combined ideas for two stories into one, and made what had been a secondary character in one of them into the main character in Grace, which you can read about on the home page.
I have since left working in software. I also moved on to another story, this one named Webster, which you can also read about on the home page.
I also plan to write essays on a variety of topics. Some essays are inspired by black and white photographs I’ve taken over the years, and some essay ideas have inspired me to take other black and white photographs. You can see snippets of them on the Essays page where there are links to the full essays. Because I am focusing on book length projects, new essays and photographs may be added only infrequently.
Which brings me to two questions: Why do I want to write? And why focus on book length projects? The short answer to both is that I felt a need to restore creativity in what I was doing, and though I didn’t know it by name, I was (and am) striving to achieve the thing that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” The long answer will take some time to write; I might write it as an essay sometime.