Welcome aboard!

Isn’t it strange that writers rarely write about writing?

I’d like to personally welcome you to the wit and (hopefully!) wisdom of a professional word wrangler. I’m a technical writer for a small software company in Dallas, TX, with over a decade of experience in the IT industry. I’ve made a few attempts to write fiction, but I am sadly lacking the storyteller’s gift. Organization and analysis, on the other hand, come easily. I’m still fairly new to my chosen career in technical writing, with only a few years under my belt, but my passion for detail and accuracy seem to serve me quite well.

Since I don’t have a college degree as a technical writer (as yet), I’m left to my own devices for researching techniques and methods. What I’ve found over the years is a painful lack of technical writers talking about technical writing. Plenty of fiction writers maintain blogs and write novels about writing novels, but where are the documenters, the knowledge base content creators, the managers of the volumes of information that is the lifeblood of almost every IT company? (Answer: they’re busy.)

So, in an effort to fill that gap, perhaps with useful and insightful information for other budding technical writers, I present you with this documentation of my journey.

Music to work by

It’s interesting the kind of music that helps me actually get work done. You’d think that word-less mellow background music would do it, right?  Something like Deep Forest or Amethystium?  Not at all.  I fall asleep — even with a quad mocha to start the day, an inspiring project and comfy work environment.  Turns out that I need wall-of-sound, minor key tonality, heavy guitar, strong lyrics and dense synth effects.  At least, that’s what Pandora.com tells me. It used to be Gravity Kills and NIN, but now I lean more toward Birthday Massacre and Collide. (I suppose the girls are a little more “chipper”.)

Thusly acoustically armed, with a big mug of orange-spice tea to sip and hummus+pita to nibble, I’ll now be getting back to writing some test cases.