My story - the decision to write

I accepted that I need to find some additional work, but I had some limitations. I take care of my niece two days a week and that is just non-negotiable. That means that in addition to my personal aversion to a “real” job, I am simply unable to commit to that kind of schedule. Temp jobs are a lot of work to find and don’t pay that well, so it seemed that some kind of self-employment was the way to go.

More programming was out. Although I have some experience with the “sexy” languages like C and Java, I don’t have enough to be taken seriously. LabVIEW serves a limited audience, plus my contract requires my to funnel any LabVIEW work through the company I’m subcontracting through.

I’ve been building computers for years for myself, friends, and family but I just wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to do for a living. Besides, past experience trying to get into help desk and network support has shown me that the computer industry has been flooded with people who have heard that that is where the money is, making it hard for the people who are actually good at it and enjoy it to get jobs.

Even though it’s been only a few months, I honestly don’t remember how I locked on to writing. I’ve always liked writing and I’ve considered trying to make it my career before, but I was concerned about the pressure of writing on demand. Now, though, it doesn’t seem so scary. Maybe because I have less choice in the matter.

“Writing” is a pretty broad subject, so now I needed to figure out what areas to focus one.