An overdue thanks to Bryan for all the work he did in making GTDMail known to the world, and for the acknowledgement. I just figured it was so simple that everyone else was already doing it…

Oh yeah, and happy birthday.

Is it something I love to do?

In my last post I mentioned three criteria to look for if you’re thinking about turning an avocation into a vocation. Just like on the cop shows, you have to have motive, means, and opportunity. First up is motive: Do you love doing it?

According to my parents, I learned to read around the age of 2 1/2. Even before I started school, I was known as the little kid who read all the time. All that reading inevitably led to the next step. In elementary school, I wrote short stories (based on the superhero playacting that my friends and I did at recess), and had my mom type them up. I’d bind my “books” with cardboard and contact paper, and enter them in district creative writing contests. I usually got some sort of ribbon, but at that age, so did everyone else.

In middle and high school, I was one of the geeky kids, so naturally I took to satire. Sometimes I’d rip on the popular crowd; other times I’d target a teacher, and hope my masterpiece didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Once I wrote a doozy of a poem about a local poet who guest taught our English class that week. I skewered everything from her politics to her teeth. I got big laughs from everyone — everyone except my English teacher and the poet herself. Someone I showed it to had left it behind in class. I apologized to her face (the hardest thing I’d ever done), ripped up the offending piece of poetry and burned it. I still cringe when I think of it.

The point of this little retrospective indulgence (and there’s more where that came from) is that I enjoy writing. I always have. Even when it got me into trouble. I also enjoy some aspects of software development, but mostly the creative side. I guess no one really enjoys debugging or code maintenance. But even the problem-solving bits don’t grab me very much. I like designing an application from scratch, at a high level. I like seeing the pieces come together and begin to work just as I imagined them. But once the big-picture stuff is done, I’m ready to move on.

I’m not saying that your job has to be the most fun and compelling way you spend your time. If that were the only thing that mattered, I wouldn’t need to cover means and opportunity. But taking a little pleasure in what you get paid for goes a long way.

Earlier this week, I was frustrated with my day job, and kicking around ideas for a possible career change someday, when I happened to remember that I love to write. One small problem, though. With the exception of my aviation journal, I haven’t done any writing to speak of since college.

Around 2 am the same night, I had an epiphany, and a raging case of insomnia to go with it. The insomnia was probably brought on by the two buckets of popcorn I had at the movies, but the epiphany kept me awake for hours. A blog would be the perfect laboratory for flexing my literary muscles back into shape. Mixaphorically speaking.

I’ve never been really interested in having a blog like the ones I read. I love reading about the latest geekety gadgets, playing with the latest web app, and wasting time with new productivity techniques. For the most part, I’ll leave them to others who are more than up to the task. Instead, I’ll focus on the tools, tricks and art of writing. I don’t know what kind yet; hopefully a little of everything. Fiction is going to be the hardest, partly because it’s what I enjoy reading the most, and my standards are high. Partly because I have zero ideas for the next great American novel.

The driving force behind this flight of fancy (there go those mixaphors again), besides the obvious creative satisfaction, is that I want to someday replace my day job with something more flexible and enjoyable. Who knows — maybe I was meant to write prose instead of software. Writing also meets my three criteria for a killer career change: motive, means, and opportunity. Maybe I’ve just been watching too much CSI, but in any case, my next three posts are cut out for me.

Consider this post the equivalent of scratching a pen back and forth on a blank page until the ink starts to flow. I do have something lucid to write, but for now, I’m just going to mess up the page a little so it’s not so intimidating.