The Problem of Writing Full Time

My writing career thus far

I’ve had a number of interests in my life. At a very early age, I wanted to be a cartoonist and make comic strips like my favorite comic strip, Garfield. But I also got into computers at an early age — a Commodore 64 was an amazing thing, and I was able to actually go in the computer room in 1st grade instead of recess. Eventually, my parents got a computer — a Tandy, if anyone remembers what that is — and I started to fiddle in BASIC.

Though I still wanted to write and create movies or TV shows or anything with stories or comedy, when it came time to think of a career, computers were the obvious choice. I got a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon — but while I was there, I wrote humorous editorials for the school newspaper.

Still, I got a nice engineering job after college (I graduated in 2001), and while I had some ambition to write a novel, I didn’t do much writing anymore.

And then 9/11 happened.

Now, there is a lot that changed with 9/11, but the important one to my story is the warbloggers — people who started blogging in the need to do something after 9/11. And I saw it was decently easy to start a blog and get an audience, so I thought I’d give it a go. My focus was politics, but I was in my early 20s at the time and didn’t feel I had any wisdom to hand out, so I decided to instead write silly and stupid stuff.

I had some success blogging and built up an audience and got other writing opportunities, such as columns and books, but this was all on the side while working as a software engineer for the vast majority of my income. Writing was never more than a few extra dollars here and there, if that.

Then I got this opportunity to work for Emergent Order, which was hiring me full-time for my creative ability. I got to do some work I couldn’t believe — like work on a web series where I got to write scripts and be involved in casting. It was quite a change of pace from being an engineer.