Bipolar indeed..

When I started getting semi-serious about my professional life, back around ’95 or so, it was in tech. I sort of snuck in through the back door of the 90’s tech boom, first as an under-the-radar coder for Lockheed Martin and then a UNIX sysadmin for Verizon Communications. Did a lot of computer geeking, made more than a few dollars, and gradually discovered that I didn’t want to be doing that at 40. I’d dreamed of being a writer since high school and never found the nerve to really throw everything I had at it. Turning 30 in 2001 forced me to face that. So I walked out of tech and leaped headlong into the dream.

I started a copywriting business, did some tech consulting work occasionally to bring in quick cash, and gradually made it work. The first year I ate a lot of beans and barely paid the rent. Every year since then I’ve done a bit better than the year before, and by 2007 I was making almost as much money as I did in my tech days. Not bad when you consider that, statistically, only a few percent of working writers make more than $20K a year.

Writing can be a strange life. We meet weird people, learn weird things. We learn to walk this awkward line where we occasionally make a difference to people but mostly sit on the sidelines, telling the stories of people actually in the trenches. Like I told Monica and her firefighter husband Scott that night at dinner, us writers do what we do because we don’t have the guts to do what Scott does. At the same time, writers tend to get free license to be weird. We’re expected to be odd, which can be fun. Unfortunately I’m too conservative for my own good sometimes, so I rarely exploit that.

I think the pressures of running a business keep me in check. I don’t have the time to do the Hunter Thompson thing – I have clients to keep happy, marketing to do, invoices to print and mail, finances to manage, growth to manage. And it’s frustrating and exhausting sometimes, with a smattering of outright annoying from time to time. But there’s still no line of work I’d rather be doing.

It’s all something that I’m glad Kristi understands. Not many people do. She’ll never know how much that means to me.

(By the way, we’re launching a second copywriting website to build a larger West Coast clientele. Watch us grow at B2BWords.com!)

Ye gods.. the move.

While Kristi and her family are running around getting contracts signed and people paid and plans worked out, I have a move to make happen by the end of November. In some ways, it’s going to be the easiest move I’ve done; 80% of my stuff is staying in Florida or getting thrown out. Most of my furniture is cheap bachelor stuff (a guy just needs a place to sit, you know?) that I bought back in my Verizon tech days, 7-8 years ago. It’s showing its age, so I can Goodwill it all without much remorse. Most of the stuff being moved to Modesto is tech, books, files, kitchen stuff and personal items. My apartment right now is full of cardboard boxes – many scored from the local McDonalds that I live behind – and now the hard job is just sorting it all.

We’re going to end up in December with a garage full of boxes labeled “Chicken McNuggets – Frozen” and “Uncooked Potatoes – Salt Fries!”. Because really.. what’s a modern garage without a mountain of fast food cardboard?

The books are tough calls. A writer plus an English teacher equals a big household library. Most of the paperbacks stay. The rares (including several early Harlan Ellison and Frank Herbert hardbacks), my tech book library and most of my writing books get moved. Kristi’s already laid claim to my copy of Frankenstein; I’m debating about my collected William Blake. Blake’s never really been my thing, but somehow I can’t bring myself to part with it. Right now I’m running a 2:1 ratio in favor of books not being moved, but that may be because I haven’t started on nonfiction yet. Decisions on books like Salem’s Lot are pretty easy.

At least I’m sparing Kristi the Buckaroo Banzai novelization. (And yes, hon, I do own one.)