What Is Geek To Author About?

I wrote this up post up and made it a permanent blog page to be added to over time.

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What is Geek To Author?

Geek to Author is exactly what it means, a career Geek (me) taking a journey to being an Author, a writer, a creator of something meaningful that will last. There are many sites out there on the Internet on how to take charge, make yourself marketable, how to generate traffic to your blog(s), but rarely do you find anyone that details these words of wisdom in actual practice outside those advise sites.

Geek to Author is going to do that. Document what I do, what I feel, what I am working on when it comes to writing. Whether it's my personal journal, story, or a blog posts writing is writing. This will be helpful for me, hopefully it will be helpful for that one individual that get that little extra bump of confidence with finishing their creation, and it will open the door for discussions for everyone that will help everyone.

Who is The Geek?


The Geek is a career IT security expert of almost 20 years. During that time I have had worked long, hard, stressful hours for big and small companies doing anything and everything IT related. I built servers, configured them, programmed websites, scripted jobs, built and implemented security models, ran support teams, managed people and departments and strove to be the best I could be. As time went on the work evolved I started to have less and less fun doing it. Looking back on my career I can say confidently I am very successful and have built an industry reputation to support that. Yet, I can't find many things that still exist that I can say "I did that". The only big tangible accomplishment I can proudly claim is a Unites States Patent I received for my first web application I built from the ground up. A real-time, web based application that displayed testing results of 100,000 phone tests of telecommunication systems. Exciting I know, but for what it was at the time and for the 2 years of my life I put into that work, it deserved what it got in recognition. But that's about it. Everything else over time has been obsoleted, grown past my contributions, or has been replaced. That's the IT world, ever changing, yet remarkably unsatisfying for long durations of time. You get bursts accomplishments that are sort lived as the next problem jumps into the chamber and the old, spent shell is ejected out. Round and round that goes. Over time the chase has gotten old and the challenge level has decreased to the point of cruise control.

After long months of making excuses, procrastinating, and doing everything I could internally to talk my self out of it. I had enough of it and I decided that I was going to be a writer, I wrote it down, I made the commitment. The life of the IT expert is no longer intellectually fulfilling and the challenge has been lost. I am not saying I have lost my inner passion fo technology, I love it, and I will continue to try to be on the bleeding edge of innovation but it has turned into a job. Perhaps it's the nature of the business I am in, the level of expertise I have obtained taking me farther away from the creation and more into the management and maintenance of how its created. Regardless of the reason I realized that I need to create. I keep coming back to writing as something I love to do. I love to write. I am not planning to leave my day job anytime soon, not even on the radar. I am looking to nurture a new craft and see where it goes.

What Can You Expect From Geek To Author?

I read a great manifesto on blog creation and building relationships with my readers. It made it very clear that I need to layout what my readers can expect from this blog. How many entries, how often, the topics so you as a reader know what to expect. On the flip side it keeps me honest and on a schedule to produce content... to write. Originally when I created this blog I intended to do a daily entry to record what I wrote for that day. But after a week I realized that it's not realistic to do that. I don't want to turn this into a grinding work force like the daily office regimen is.

• 2 to 3 posts a week that will cover books, writing exercised, references, resources, words of wisdom, personal stories about the journey
• 1 weekly post that will layout what I wrote that week, what I am working on, and what I plan to do

I want this to become an interactive community. Feedback, no matter what it is, can be useful to someone whether I like it or not. But being an IT guy, spammers will not be tolerated.

The Blog Itself

For the time being I am going to focus on content. I will the Dynamic View layout for the time being, it's slick, simple, easy and focuses on the content not ad space. I have an AdSense account but I will not be putting those ads on here. In fact I probably will not put those types of ads up here at all. More on that later. Not if, but when I reach 3,000 subscribers to the RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Geektoauthor) then I will move this blog to a proper domain and blog format.  Why 3,000? Why not?

On the right side of the blog, hidden, is the little submenu. Over there I will be putting links to other blogs and websites that I subscribe to, use, and interact with that I feel are worthy to share.

Time to turn the page...