Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I'm not sure if there is already a thread for this but I'd like to start a thread where all of our writers here can introduce themselves. Maybe talk about their work or what they are working on.

I'm an aspiring writer, not working on a project at the moment but I do work for a news site. It would be awesome to chat with each other, share tips and more.

I have the dubious honor of this affliction. I write policy for the gubermint, novels for the lowest depths of Amazon's rankings, and occasional long-winded forum posts. I'm working on book 3 in a crime thriller series. My journal here has more info.

I am a writer. I have published some short stories, am working on a novel. I write a lot for my job, but do not wear the title "writer" there. Am working on doing more with my writing to transition from my current corporate job to something more writerly.

Uhm, Hello my name is Jacob and I'm a writer ;-P

I'm currently 39 and by now I have tried many different kinds of work but the thing that keeps coming back to me is the fact that I seem to be uniquely talented for reading a lot and distilling/abstracting/generalizing that information into writing. I'm somewhat talented in many other areas but nothing seems to shine as much as the writing, relatively speaking. It's what people noticed when I did physics (yeah, I wrote some nicely written papers). It's what people seemed to appreciate about the blog. It's kinda the role I'm being funneled into in my finance job---well maybe not writer, but teacher.

That said, I feel more like a medium for my writing. I'm not good at writing or doing anything professionally, i.e. "I need 5000 words by tomorrow morning"-style is not what I do best. Rather I sit around and wait for muses and when they strike I write a lot. My one writing fear is a permablock.

Me.

I wrote software for 20 years. Because I was good at writing, toward the end of my career I ended up doing more tech writing than application development. Tech writing is when you become a translator between engineers and Luddite business managers, writing documents for one group to be used by the other, so that your company's software development efforts don't look like this:



You also end up writing user manuals, help files, flow charts, and doing software documentation both in the code and out. I've done it all. Most developers HATE documentation and will do anything they can to avoid it. Because I showed an aptitude and actually enjoyed it, I was able to have as much of it as I wanted once I gained some seniority.

Since I retired, I've been trying my hand at writing novels. I'm working on a series at present. I've yet to submit it for publication, although I will when it's in a more polished state.

Novelist here. I'd be happy to participate in this thread, but I'm currently distracted by NaNoWriMo.

So, Ian, did you win NaNo? I didn't, but i got a good start on my novel

Writing is an on again, off again hobby for me. I've completed one lousy novel, a few dozen short stories, and a couple dozen of what are arguably poems (I say no, the one reader I've shared some of them with says yes). Nothing ever published or even submitted. I've been pretty inactive the last few years, but it is something I intend to resurrect before long.

EdithKeeler wrote:So, Ian, did you win NaNo? I didn't, but i got a good start on my novel

Congratulations on your good start. I don't usually celebrate since I know some people struggle with the goal, so let me just say I won NaNo fairly early in the month.

I write rather regularly for one media company and intermittently for other publications. I've been earning most of my income from my self published books for a couple years.

I somehow ended up writing for a living. been trying to quit for years, but they keep pulling me back in.

For those of you who don't like to pay for an editor (we're an under-appreciated bunch ), Appsumo has a great deal on Grammarly today (4/9). It's not the same as using an editor, but it's better than nothing.

Appsumo deal ($29 for a year of Grammarly premium) http://www.appsumo.com/grammarly-last-chance/

Grammarly site https://www.grammarly.com/