I have wanted to say this sentence for most of my adult life: I am now a full-time writer and developer.
I’ve been building software for a living since 1999, developer first, then technology manager, and writing novels in the hours around the job. Early mornings, mostly. It was a good career and I won’t pretend otherwise. But this spring I reached a fork in the road: one path led back to the sensible job, the other toward the two things I have actually loved all along. I took the second one.
Here is what those years taught me about myself: I like to make things. That is the whole engine. The novels and the code have never felt like separate lives to me. They are the same impulse pointed at different materials. A book is a made thing. So is a program. Either way, you start with nothing, you build something nobody asked for, and if you have done it right, a stranger picks it up and it works for them.
What I love most is making tools. A tool is a particular kind of made thing, because it is not finished when you ship it. You use it every day, and every day it tells you, in small irritations, exactly what is wrong with it. So you fix that, and use it again. A novel is done when it is done; a tool you get to hone for years. And a tool that has earned its keep in your own hands is worth handing to somebody else.
Which brings me to the plan. I started building Verkilo in 2022. The technology has matured to the point that I’m going to start fresh and build in everything I’ve learned over the past 25 years. And I’ll continue writing my novels. Let’s see how I do in a year.
I’ll write here as it happens. Time to get to work.