Writing Pause

Once I start at Maxis, I'm going to cut back on my freelance writing. One reason is that the team will be moving toward crunch mode. But the main reason would have been true in any new job: I want to build my team's trust in me before I do writer things such as going to wine tastings in the middle of the day or visiting wineries or whatever. My current employer has given me a lot of freedom in this regard, but it didn't at first.

My clients have been pretty understanding. One asked me to do a piece because it wouldn't require any fieldwork (plus, they said, my copy is pretty clean, and they were a bit desperate for it). (I turned them down.) I bowed out of a Chronicle lede because I won't have time to give it the research it deserves, but then my editor asked if I'd be willing to write a 400-word review/commentary of a new book.

Overall, my life as a published writer is taking a breath. But I'm not letting it sit idle. Instead, I have writing skills that I want to develop. I'll be working on essays — a genre that I adore above all other non-fiction but which I find difficult to write, despite the real argument you could make that each OWF post is an essay exercise. I'm also planning to work on my narrative nonfiction abilities; I want to be the type of writer who casts features in the form of conflicts, crises, and resolutions. I want my pieces to have a story flow that brings the reader into the prose. And I want to continue to grow my newfound library research knowledge. If I may use a metaphor from my newest development project, those skills are currently in the Tidepool phase and I want them to be at the Civilization phase. My existing research skills have earned compliments from Ed Behr, which counts for a lot, but I want to go further.

But aside from my writing skills, I intend to devote some time to my programming projects. My recent job quest and my parallel investigation of the latest, greatest technologies have reminded me how much I like programming. I go through little phases where I believe I no longer do, but it doesn't usually take much to remind me of the sheer joy of coding. I'm working on a "wine notebook/cellar management" system, which I may or may not make more available. The application allows me to have a project where I have to explore technologies in depth but not spend months and months and months working with them. I can do a Spring/Hibernate/YUI version, as I am now, or a Mac OS X/iPhone version, or a Ruby on Rails version, all using the same database. Doing any one of those gives me enough of a grounding in the technologies to work on more complicated projects (at least in theory — I already know a fair amount about Spring, something about Hibernate, but nothing at all about YUI).