I used to earn a living writing. Mostly, I did magazine stuff, and most of that was computer oriented, and most of that was about the Apple Macintosh and its software, hardware and peripherals.
I noodled around with fiction several times. I had a good start on a story about some mean ol’ terrorists, who took down the electrical grid in the middle of a hot summer. It never really went anywhere. I had another one about a kid racing go-karts who ended up a professional racer in Formula One and IndyCar. It never went anywhere, either.
I spent years trying to get a Book Deal. When I was a member of the Computer Press Association, that was always the thing. I got closest with Apple’s (Claris’) upcoming way-kewl new “works” program, code named Terminator. It hit the shelves as ClarisWorks, and just like Microsoft Works, it featured a really average word processor, a really average spreadsheet, and so on. Four or five components under one brand and banner and paid for with one humble check. I thought it was going to take over the world and I worked hard to get a beta copy, and put feelers out to the publishers and seek help from my already-published compu-writer friends and… well, apparently everyone else got there first. Nobody picked it up. Now the Computers section of our local Barnes&Noble has gone from about seven bays of books down to just two. And with the implosion of print publishing it looks like new good computer books may be few and far between.
I have a hundred little stories about my life, my dog, my girlfriends, my politics and music and on and on…. But I can’t seem to string them all together the way, say, Frank McCourt did with Angela’s Ashes.
Maybe this is something I can revisit in my retirement years. I hope so. I miss it.
