I used to write software for a living. It suited me well because I was able to be moderately successful with hardly any social skills to speak of. I had to be a team player of course, but I could mostly avoid the glad-handing and small talk that are commonplace in benighted fields like marketing.

Best of all for me was that computer programs are written. In my mid-twenties, I was becoming increasingly aware that my dreams of becoming a professional writer were not going to bear fruit anytime soon. A lackluster stint as an editorial intern at a weekly paper made that clear. I was happy to shelve my dream and do something with “writing” in its name but did not involve any writing at all.

Wait. That is not entirely true. Sometime during the mid aughts, there was some news about a dentist who ejaculated into the mouths of his patients. I decided to translate the story into Perl. It went like this:

foreach (@dentist) {
        sqrt $emen;
}

That may not resonate with non-nerds, but I thought it was funny as hell.

Now where was I? Ah yes, the writing that isn’t writing even though you use a regular keyboard and type some actual words. I remember when I was a fledgling computer geek circa 1987. A friend/mentor quipped “When they came up with COBOL, they wanted a computer language that read like a book. Unfortunately, the book they had in mind was War and Peace.”

I laughed and pretended I got the joke. I had never seen any COBOL and had only heard of it because it was the name of one of the levels in the “Tron” video game. To be honest, I did not know much about War and Peace either, other than it was long. I lack the staying power to tackle Russian novels by choice.

Knowing I was full of shit, I was able to have this nonsense connection live in my head free of reflection or scrutiny. I also did some actual writing in my spare time while code writing paid my bar tab. I knew I would write fiction full time when cash flow became less of an issue. Meanwhile, the methodology of my day job would prove invaluable when I made the profession shift.

It didn’t. The big thing in tech in recent years is something they call AGILE. It stands for something, but I can’t be bothered looking it up. The basic idea is that you work in iterations, making continuous improvements based on feedback as time progresses. This is a departure from the waterfall, where you labor away and don’t release anything until you have finished. I liked AGILE because the work never really ends and there is continuous employment, budget permitting.

Book writing doesn’t work like that. You need to make sure it’s right because when you’re done, you are done. You have this brief feeling of accomplishment, then ask yourself now what? You may not have the answer right away, but you know it’s going to be another deep dive.