Back In The Writing Swing

I am begging to find my writing groove again. I am writing every day trying to focus mainly on fiction, creative works but also blogging meaningful posts on my other blogs that are more aligned with my career works.

I am using Wattpad as my posting place and where I write the most. Here's my profile.

All the little ideas I have I am putting into collections or writing them as stand along short stories. My goal this year, like last, is to ramp up and participate in the NaNoWriMo this year. Either complete my Emerald Event novel or start a new one. I may trash and re-write The Emerald Event but between now and then I may get motiviated on something else in my journals of ideas.

Either way I am getting my routine and loving it again. I have finally figured out how to let go and stop over analyzing my works to an impossible goal of 'perfection'. Create, mold, then let it go.

WOOT!

Time to turn the page.

Hello 2015, Not starting New But Readjusting Focus

Happy New Year! Are you pumped? Are you ready to tackle your resolutions for the new year and feel regret around Feb. that you failed them the 2nd week of Jan? Resolutions like goals are worthless unless you have a plan to get to them. Just saying I am going to write more, drink less, make more friends are valueless without an idea on how you are going to do it.

I didn't make resolutions I made plans.

Plans to write 500 words a day. Instead of locking myself into 500 words of fiction or 500 words of my projects, open it up to 500 words in general. Everything I write can be counted except for emails, texts or other communications. Journals, blogs, stories, brain dumps, or just free writing with absolutely no purpose all count. The only sub-rule is that my writing style or approach is slightly new each time. Whether I use alternative language, rely on a thesaurus for new ways to say the same thing or change the tone. That's the only way you can grow, stick to the same and you will remain the same. How do you know if another way is better for you unless you try it?

That's my year. Rebuilding my routine but opening my walls to a less restrictive approach and that may sharpen my other focuses on the things I do want to get really good at. Fiction writing.

You don't know unless you experiment. You really don't know unless you actually do it.

Time to turn the page.

NaNoWriMo Is Almost Over And I Failed

EPIC FAIL. That's me. Terrible, awful, no excuses although I did my best to make them up. Last year I completed the NaNoWriMo with my project Perspectives. Almost 60,000 words and looking back on it the draft is crap, but it has a shell of a story. Long and drawn out but a story nonetheless.

This year I have nothing to show for it. Nothing structured anyway and no where near 50,000 words. Only myself to blame, words ain't going to write themselves.

However there is a bright, white light. I had an epiphany that may be my gateway to getting something solid and perfected and I owe it to my 6 year old son. He has taken to reading like a duck out of water. He's reading at a 3rd and 4th grade level with near photographic memory comprehension... he's in 1st grade. He is bored with the books his age, refuses to read 'picture' books and only chapter books yet we haven't found a series he likes yet. He has read two American Chillers books which are not really horror genre because the 'horror' is a setup joke to take away the real horror. They are about 150-180 pages and he'll read them about 5 chapters at a setting. He' reading who cares, right?

Anyway out of the blue he asked me to write him a book and he will read that. What a great idea! His 6 year old mind of absolute insane imagination and processing would be a great source of material and flow for a story. Tell me what you want to read about and I will fill in the blanks. I have even began to record him in the morning to describe his dreams from the night before, sometime they are the scariest things I have heard. To him it's as real as life but to me it's a starting point to wrap a world around and aim it to a sub-10 year old mind.

Yes! Exciting.

I don't need NaNoWriMo, I just needed my purpose. I think I found it.

Time to turn the page.

Writing Is Fun Even Though It Isn't

Writing is fun. It is, believe me. Sitting down and painting your thoughts with words is a liberating experience. Once you let go and allow your mind to go where it wants the results can be amazing. Shocking perhaps.

I used to write thousands of lines of code, computer programming, hours and hours of pumping out creativity using computer logic. There are many times when I go back and see what I built and I am amazed that I came up with that a built it. Writing is no different.

You can plot, plan, sketch, flow, chart, diagram all you want around a story or idea but until you put words on paper it will never be realized. That's the fun part.

Writing is also one of the the most frustrating, complicated and confusing abilities humans can do. One moment you can be on a roll then your creative processing center shuts off. Disappears. This could happen for any number of reasons, emotions, overthinking, it's raining outside or it's too sunny out, the baby's crying or you're hungry. Mind over body, creativity over analysis, free-flowing or planned. Writing is a battle.

That's why every book, author, blog, speech, class everywhere tells you to write everyday. A writer writes, always. Write daily. Don't stop writing. Keep the mind going, leave it free, create with your words, paint that picture, introduce new worlds and people, express yourself. If you don't write, you can't do anything.

Accept frustration, anger, obstacles. Accept success, creation and accomplishment. Regardless on how 'good' your stories are, at least you wrote a story. Then next one will be a little better and the one after than better than the first. That's the enjoyment and also the hatred of the process. If you are like me nothing will ever be good enough, you just need to learn to love creating and let it go when you are done.

Time to turn the page.

New Year Bring New Writing Focus

So I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge and I have 50,000 words toward a novel completed and sitting in draft mode. My intention was to pick it up but life stepped in once again. My second child arrived in Mid-December and that put everything on the back burner.

The routines are settling in, the holidays are over, the New Year has arrived and in 2014 I am moving forward with my writing. I am going to be integrating my writing during the day, I have to. With a 5 year old and 3 week old in the house, wanted to sleep at some point, writing when I used to later at night isn't a good option. Instead I will write over my lunch hour at work. I'll find a dark conference room and tuck myself away and write in silence.

Using the gift cards I received as gifts I picked up a pretty good book, so far, called Writer with a Day Job. It is more about creating a writing schedule and routine around other busy aspects of ones life whether it's a job, family or other responsibilities. Consistency, consistency, and writing always.

The NaNoWriMo showed me that I can do and I love it. Like everyone else I need to find time to do it because writing isn't going to replace my day job any time soon. Odds are it never will, but that's an assumption I hope I get wrong. But I will never get close to that until I write more often than I do now.

Time to turn the page.

Greetings From The Geek

Lots has happened since I started up this side persona of the Geek to Author. Life happened as we were blessed with another child set to arrive at the end of the year. Work happened. Healthy focused lifestyle happened. Writing as much as I wanted to and what I wanted to write did not.

I was re-reading this blog and saw more posts about excuses and false starts than productive posts about my writing and things learned along the way. I still desire to write, I don't know why it appeals to me. I love to read and what I have wrote I thinks is pretty good. Putting it together in a routine of practice and getting out of this mind set that everything I write must be published is hard.

A writer writes, always. I am not. I am, but not everyday and not fiction. Even this blog has inadvertently turned into a blah blah post about something worthy instead of a blog or journal of the transition of an 20 year veteran IT Geek to an author. My claim to say that I officially am an author is to make 1 sale of an ebook in Amazon (to a complete stranger). That's my goal. Then I can say I did that, if it gets more great, if someone spends time to rate it, good or bad, even better.

Another mistake I have made is trying to get more exposure first with little substance of stories or works to put behind it. I am a mamber of several writing sites, lists, boards. I get daily stories to read that I never get around to, tips everyday, podcasts, and the more time I spend reading those topics I am not spending on writing something. Even if it's a short narrative of what I see outside my office window at a random time during the day, at least it's writing. Who knows, that small idea may spawn into the next big seller.

You will see more posts from me, I promise. More personal posts and less me trying to be a news source of canned inspirational posts, reposts or links to another site. I will if I stumble across something that I find very useful but no more of that stuff just to get a post done.

The Geek will become an author and I want to take you with me.

More to come, I promise.

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The Geek Is Struggling Getting To The Author

I admit that when I decided to try out being a Geek to Author I thought it would be easier than it really is. I am no where near the writer that I wanted to be. My struggle has been and still is over analyzing my plans, flows, designs of the story and doing less and less writing. So I can't be an author unless I write.

I still read tons and have expanded the genres to help get me motivated and to get me understanding what works and what doesn't in story telling. Yet my actual writing discipline has been atrocious. Even my posts on this blog has been awful.

Even as I write this I have that fire to create through words. The stories that I have written, some I posted, some I have not, I think are great and fun. It drives me insane to see people like Hugh Howey that wrote as a side hobby and hit it big with his Wool series. By the way, if you like dystopian sci-fi, the Wool series are some of the best stories out there. They are short stories/novellas and very worth checking it out.

Anyway, the Geek is still here. The Geek is still writing, reading, studying, trying to balance work, life and this new ambition. I will crack it out.

I have plans, plots, character sketches, and story flows sitting in my journals. Why can't I get them on paper? I can tell you, over analyzed and unfounded fear of failure and perfection.

My entire working career things I write either work or they don't. Writing doesn't follow the computer programming laws.

Time to turn the page.

Writing progress

I have fallen into a slump. A pit is more accurate. My writing and my focus on it has slid again. My interest is still there, I have significantly increased my casual reading and studying but sitting down and putting words on paper has waned.

This is the challenge when trying to balance a job, family, young children, and keeping up with casual activities to keep my mind sane. Things get re-prioritized and shifted away. Writing has had that happen to it. I am not sure if it's intentional or not, but that has what's happened.

If I ever crossed a genie my first wish would be to never have the biological need to sleep again. 24 hours a day to be able to work, play, and grow. Sleep gets in the way.

I am picking away at my Perspectives series. I think now that I am looking at it I will limit the project to 400 pages. Since it's made up of several sub-stories its not that unobtainable. Keeping the connections between the stories to accomplish my design of what Perspectives is however very difficult.

I will keep more diligent discipline to my scheduling. I will be more detailed on my scheduling and what my goals are for each session. Create writing goals. Write more leisure, one page sessions of complete random thoughts, maybe try picking a random sentence out of the newspaper and writing a few hundred word short story around that sentence. Anything.

Progress is still being made just not as much as I'd like. Which is 100% my fault.

Time to turn the page.

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...