New Blog/New Writing Endeavor
Posted by Matt Uhrich
Photo by L. MarieI’ve been an avid reader since I was a kid. It started when I was nine or ten and my parents made the rule that I could stay up later if I was reading a book. Thanks for the addiction, mom and dad.
Sometime early in high school my dad gave me Citizen of the Galaxy and Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein. I was hooked on science-fiction immediately. I’ll read almost any genre if I’m in the right mood, but for the last twenty years, my one true love has been science-fiction.
I’ve had the urge to write for most of that time, but other interests and a decided lack of ability in that area pushed it out of my mind. In the 10 years since college, the urge has returned. And over the last five years has intensified. Added to that is a growing distaste for office life and working for a company. So I’ve decided to do something about it and begin writing a novel—science-fiction, of course.
I’ve been taking notes on four or five story ideas for the past few years. I never got to the point where I would actually write anything other than notes. They are all good ideas for stories, but one in particular generated far more notes than the others. I would find myself thinking about it several times a day.
Certain events over the past few years have led me to the conclusion that I needed to begin the process of extracting myself from the mainstream IT and business world. I came to a point in my life where I needed to fully commit to application development in order to stay current with the constantly changing technology scene or branch off into something else. I had already decided that management was not the path for me.
All these things led to the decision that it was time for me to take action and work towards a career in writing science-fiction. So this spring I became one of the many unpublished authors. At this time I have finished three chapters and by word-count about 10% of the novel.
I’ll be posting anything interesting I encounter while I work on the novel. I’ll also post articles or excerpts from books I read that I think will be useful to other writers. There’s a good chance I’ll post idiotic or funny stuff I find as well. My hope is to build a decent following so that if a miracle occurs and I get published, I’ll have a few dozen fans willing to buy it right away. Sounds likely, right?
I’d to post semi-regularly, whatever that means, and I will do my best to make the posts interesting and keep them under 500 words. No promises though.
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If you’re here for one of the programming articles I wrote for the old blog, I’m sorry to say, they are gone. There was only one that people seemed interested in. So if you really need to know how to search for a value in all of the tables of a SQL Server database, send me an email and I’ll get you the information.