| | Motives and motivations are as numerous as the writers who have them. The ranges and measures of "talent" or "success" reflect the prejudices of the readers. I have yet to find any endeavor for which this is not true. Different people are different and they are perceived differently.
My experiences at writing are old and deep. That I "liked" it and was "good" at it made it easy to continue, even as I tried many other disciplines. I grew up in a family of readers. I also grew up with music. In high school, my electives included journalism and band. Journalism was a lot easier. Not only did I make fewer mistakes, but fixing them was not painful.
Completing a curriculum in transportation management, I took an elective in FORTRAN. I learned to instruct a machine to perform calculations. I already had learned other languages, growing up with Hungarian and taking seven years of German before college, and then three more. Computer programming was another language skill. Reading "good programming" articles in media such as Creative Computing, the lessons were easy to learn and apply.
On a project to create a distributed database at General Motors, no one wanted to write the documentation. I wrote it. In the last 20 years, I have created about 50 user manuals for large and small businesses in finance and automation. On a project at Digital Equipment, they wanted me to prove that someone with a high school education could read and understand the user manual. This was intuitively obvious to them, but they wanted proof. So, I read some books on reading metrics and wrote a Fortran program to parse the user manual. On a project to create a multiprocessor high speed industrial controller, I pushed the manual for the interactive debugger down to the sixth grade reading level. Good writing is easy to understand.
Working in technology and business, I meet entrepreneurs and creators. Writing magazine articles about them is extra money for me. It also allows me to honor them among their peers.
When I was in high school and read Ayn Rand's Objectivist Newsletter, I was shocked by her condemnation of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I survived. Since then, I have had three good opportunities to take the EB to task. Their opinions on the Spanish Armada and the Battle of Lake Erie were easy to balance against the facts presented by the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Americana. When I discovered numismatics, I started writing about coins in particular and money in general. While citing the Britannica in print, I told myself a joke in my head. One consequence of that was a literary award from the American Numismatic Association. I now write a monthly column ("Internet Connections") for the ANA's Numismatist magazine.
As a "radical for capitalism" I find annoying inconsistencies within numismatics. It is a hobby where people buy and sell money in a laissez faire economy. Yet, anti-capitalist attitudes seep into the common expectations. I am preparing a paper for a festschrift in which I establish a capitalist context for the "wildcat" banking era in American history.
"Nonfiction" is an anti-concept. We have no word for writing the truth. Yet, that is what I do. I have published two poems, both in computer magazines. I have published two science fiction stories. One appeared in a Loompanics catalog. The other won first prize in a contest to describe the future of design reprographics. I told the story of a designer, living on Mars as it is being colonized. They paid me a dollar a word for that.
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