Transitioning (no, not that kind)

From Software Developer to Author

Wherein I learn that mastering a language is necessary but not sufficient.

My Introduction to Programming

I caught the programming bug early, at 12 or 13. It was essentially an accident. For a time, we lived near the main York University campus on the Northern edge of Toronto. On weekends I’d ride my bike over there and go exploring through the buildings, sneak into the library and read a book (at the time I was deeply into electronics and desperately trying to understand the physics of semiconductors. Vacuum tubes made sense; introducing impurities into silicon crystals to take advantage of quantum effects was much harder). Weekends on campus were eerily desolate. Most buildings were locked, but every once in a while I’d find a door that had been propped open and slip in. Born to hack, as they say (if they don’t say that, they should).

One day I’d “cracked” the Ross Humanities building. What a goldmine that was! The math department, Senate chambers, so much to explore. Then I came to a hallway and there was unexpected noise. People. Machinery. Curious, I inched closer and peeked into the room that was this anomalous hub of activity. There were students (who were fully developed adults in my young eyes), card punches, a fellow behind a desk who took card decks from students, placed them in a card reader, and then a few minutes later returned the cards along with fan-fold sheets of paper from a noisy line printer. I had to go in.

Naturally, I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the moment that set the course of the rest of my life. All because of that fellow behind the counter, who I still wish I could track down and thank.

There was some ASCII art (actually in this case EBCDIC art) on the wall. I asked the gentleman how that was done, and instead he taught me how to write a loop in WATFIV (Waterloo FORTRAN IV) to print out the numbers from one to ten. That was it, I was hooked. Critically, he also showed me how to appropriate the account numbers of students, so I could continue running programs. Born to hack, they say. This came with a caution that I must only use WATFIV, for students had unlimited access to that, but other languages came at a steep cost. Over the next few years there I was caught more than once and either told to stop using the purloined account or given permission, with the “only WATFIV” admonition. Fortunately, acquiring a new account was trivial, all one had to do is read a number off the card at the top of a deck and then reproduce it.

I had brought my best friend into this scheme and we made some progress in learning the language. I got a copy of the language reference and was figuring out the merits of things like subroutines.

At some point, we got well and truly busted by someone in the computing department. As punishment for our crimes, we were given our own accounts and shown how to run APL, a language that had it’s own unique syntax and a character set featuring Greek characters and over-struck composites like ⍫. This required that we sit at actual interactive terminals (IBM 2741s) with a specialized “typeball” for APL.

More than half a century later, I’m still writing code.

English, the Language

I remember waking up in my crib one day, looking at the wooden blocks on a shelf in my room and realizing that a graphic, the red tent-like one with a crossbar was an A, and that it meant something. I’m guessing I was somewhere between two and a half and three at the time.

My parents were intelligent and well-read. Even though I was going to lose my father less than two years later, I grew up in a house where language was important. At school, my English marks were generally good (despite the oft repeated comment “Alan would do much better if he didn’t spend so much time day-dreaming”, something that these days would have led to an ADD/Autism diagnosis).

I recall complaining to my mother in Grade 2 that going to school was causing me to lose my vocabulary.

Still, my spelling sucked, and I pretty much decided to ignore the lessons on grammar, so that even to this day when someone says “adverb” I have to pause for a moment to remember what that means. Not that I can’t use them adequately, I just can’t name them. That’s an autistic attribute: once I’ve decided I don’t need to know something, reversing that decision is damn tough. My brain locks in to the first decision and does not want to budge.

When I got to first year of university, the administration had decided that high schools were no longer doing an adequate job of teaching English, and that each student must now write a competency test, with under-performers being required to take a remedial course. I was terrified. I had finally gotten to a place where I could study what I wanted, and I feared that my crappy spelling and grammar-resistance would consign me to yet another English course! Aughh!

The results came in and I placed in the eighth decile. Eighth. Now I know why they needed to do the tests. Incomprehensibly, I was spared.

Existential Crises

Somewhere in my late 20’s I was having the sort of “what am I doing with my life” existential crisis that is probably pretty common for people of that age. I sat down with my notebook and did an analysis of my skills, what I enjoyed where I thought I could lead a useful life. By then I had come to appreciate writing code as an arcane art form, one where the art itself is invisible. Only another practitioner who reads your code is capable of appreciating quality work, and even then the best work will never exist for long. Technology moves along rapidly. The most elegant code from five years ago can easily become the legacy crap that’s holding back progress.

What could I do that had more permanence? I could write!

The only problem being that I could write words and be destitute or write code and pay my bills. So I kept writing code, but always working to master English, this Borg of languages, always assimilating from other languages, always evolving. All while entertaining the idea of becoming a writer.

A Random Walk in Search of Authorship

In the early days of the Internet, I connected into USENET and found a community of writers (one I miss to this day). One of the things the group did was serial stories: someone would start a story, another member would add a scene, and then someone else would add another. I had a little fun with this, but… just say that my aesthetic was at odds with most of the group. I have a bit of an affinity for writing like that of Harlan Ellison and the sort of stories one might find in an episode of The Twilight Zone. My contributions to a story could take it to darker places and were often met with comments like “interesting”, with nobody making subsequent contributions.

Then AOL connected to USENET and that was the end of that.

Some time later I started to blog, writing relatively long posts on whichever topic happened to come to mind, much as I will probably be doing here. Successful blogs seem to focus on a subject area, becoming a reliable source of information on the topic they cover, or they follow someone with an interesting life (a nascent form of “influencer”). I can’t do that. I get bored. I’d post on politics, marketing economics, software development, scams, and more, essentially at random. It actually went well in the early days, when I was getting some significant search engine rank. I got a little traffic, and more important, I got comments from actual people. Then the SEO hackers figured out how to game Google, then Google changed the algorithm, and that cycle repeated many times, each time with me not interested in tracking trends. Now I use my original blog to post random rants, insights into software or hacking, not much more.

I do plan to mirror what I post here over there because like everything else that’s headed to an IPO¹, I expect Substack to go through multiple iterations of enshittification in search of more revenue, and at some point I want to pull the plug without losing my work.

At the same time I worked to hone my ability to communicate humour through platforms like IRC, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I figured these things would help me become a better writer. I was right and I was also horribly wrong.

Writing Fiction

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a list of things I want to write about, mostly science fiction based, but some non-genre fiction too. A few years back, as I started to plan moving away from writing code and running my hosting business, I figured it was time to start turning those ideas into books. This only four decades after figuring out it was what I should be doing. Ugh.

I ran into a wall. A big one. The tell is in a sentence above: “ideas into books”, not ideas into stories. So I embarked on learning storytelling. Storytelling. What a vacuum in my skill set! I picked up a couple of online courses, all basically formulaic three-act structure guides. Not that a three act work is a bad thing, but it’s also not enough for a great story. Then Susan Statham, editor of the anthology that contains my only published short story to date, suggested The Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne. With that knowledge, I took my first crack at a novel. While the start was (and is) encouraging, I became less and less happy with it as it ground to an unsatisfying conclusion.

I put the story on the shelf for the better part of a year and did a little work on the next novel. I read The Anatomy of Story by John Truby and used it for a critical assessment of my plot. Although these books have an understandable subtext of “how to write a story that will be the basis of a great screenplay” (because that’s where the real money is), they gave me the insight I needed to go back to the work and revise the plot until I got something that I think will work. At the least it’s enough to get to a “second first draft”.

Revising the work and integrating the new subplot that gives the story necessary breadth has been challenging, and slow going. Far too slow for my liking.

Neural Pathways and Transitioning

Part of the slow progress in picking my novel back up is down to a lack of practice. It’s more than a little frustrating that I can sit down and write an essay like this in one go, or that I can spend several hours working on a complex application, maintaining a vast amount of detail in my head, but I can’t yet do that when writing a novel. I find it difficult to maintain that writing head-space, distractions are harder to filter out, momentum is hard to find.

It’s also frustrating because I’m measuring five decades of coding against a few years of writing. Unrealistically, I want the level of focus I get when writing that I do when I’m coding.

I know this will come with practice, but the frustration is not only slowing progress, but it’s taking some fun out of the process.

New neural pathways can’t come soon enough. I have stories to write!

1. My reverse acronym for IPO is “It’s Pretty-much Over” since a public offering marks the point where the major stakeholder in an enterprise shifts from the users to the shareholders and the focus becomes maximizing return on equity, and not what users want. When Substack IPO’s, get ready to find a new home.