Saalon Muyo

After much ado and procrastination I’m getting the pictures together for my friend’s wedding. Elaine and Tony have been friends of mine since my days at Key and I was their wedding photographer. It was my first gig, so I had my stumbles, but the pictures are looking rather nice.

Anyway, I wanted to take the opportunity to wish a late congratulations to Yuenling and Anthony. Cento Anno!

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m learning that the only thing harder than starting your first novel is starting your second. For your first, everything is a grand experiment. You have nothing to compare it to in your own library of work, so you don’t have to worry about disappointing anyone. On the second, you get to not only have the chance of falling below the standards set by everyone else, but yourself as well.

After a lot of struggling, I’m finally on the right track for #2, and it feels good. I still get the second guessing, self-doubting attacks, but they’re coming in normal, predictable intervals now. Those I can handle.

As is my practice, I won’t discuss this next one in any detail until it’s done, but I want to get it on record that the next novel is as official as it’s going to be until I write the last line. The title - which feels like a real one and not a working title - is Sunshine Alley. It’s going to be a little grander than Broken Magic and, if I’m lucky, it may have some actual scope. Broken Magic was a personal, local coming of age story with a touch of magic. Sunshine Alley is feeling more plotted, with something at stake beyond a broken heart.

Not to say that broken hearts and crushed dreams still aren’t the more interesting parts of a story. They can just have a different impact when you have to worry about being eaten by one of the Great Old Ones of R’lyeh on top of it all. I love The Catcher in the Rye and Speak, but I also love American Gods and The Stand. After living in the land of character-study, I’m ready for an action packed vacation.

Though, knowing me, what I intend this story to be and what it will turn into are two different things. I did a lot of research on Busking for Broken Magic and ended up with about 3 whole paragraphs about it. It informed the character of Celeste a lot, but there’s a part of me that still feels the potential of that part of the story and misses having not explored it. I expect the same out of Sunshine Alley. I think that’s what keeps you moving onto the next book. Once you’ve said everything you want, it’s time to stick to exclusively writing new introductions to your reprints, I suppose.

Personally, I hope I get to keep writing new books and get the chance to pen some new introductions for a long time. All I need to do is sell something, right?

Small potatoes. Small potatoes.

I’m going to be a software engineer.

This was an unexpected development for me. I was always the least computer geeky of all of my computer geek friends. Oh, sure, I’ve been a big geek for my entire life, but I’ve been the one who didn’t have the sk1llz the others had. I can get around a bash shell, but end up looking up the proper usage of simple things like rm and grep. I can crudely insert letters into vi, but need to google anything beyond saving my changes and quitting. I ended up hacking together tools at work with Access and VBA, but hadn’t managed to get beyond basic loops and control structures in any real language.

I was a non-geek among geeks. My skills were weak. I was no programmer. I was close to certain I was never going to be.

Yet this Wednesday I begin my new position as a Software Engineer for my company. It’s a position I pursued. A position I applied for, interviewed for and wholeheartedly accepted when it was offered to me.

What my precise responsibilities will be on the day I start, I can’t tell you. I can guess that it will involve using Delphi and Visual Basic 6, but beyond that I know only that I am very, very afraid.

Ok, that’s not all I’m feeling. I’m also really excited, and am looking forward to finally picking up some skills that I’ve coveted for most of my life. I like programming. Every class I’ve ever taken in it has gone pretty damn well. The tracking tool I built for my last company was not too shabby, considering I built the thing in Access.

But I’ve never done it for real. Never done it when it mattered to a company whose revenue depended on my code working. To pull this off, I’m going to have to learn an awful lot, and I don’t know how long I’m going to have to learn it. In my future is not only Delphi and Visual Basic, but C# and connections to Microsoft SQL Server. I’ve never had to learn this much for a job before, and there’s that bad little part of me that’s afraid I just won’t be able to pass muster.

I haven’t been sitting still. I’ve spent the last month teaching myself Java, so I’ve got a foundation in something object oriented. Plus Java is similar to C#, so there’s a chance I’ll be able to pick up that skill 2-3% more quickly, now. Baby steps.

So I’m going to be a programmer. I’ll be able to discuss a project with my other friends and not have to talk in abstract concepts. Maybe I’ll even be able to fire up vi and not end up jumping down 10 lines when I meant to write “main()”

On second thought, I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Textpad may not be l33t, but at least the arrow keys do what I expect them to.