Too Beautiful, the blog

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Saturday, December 05, 2009

Woo, it's December

Lots of friends of mine have websites which were really rocking at one time or another but which have fallen into only occasional use. Others have moved entirely to the semi-walled garden of Facebook, which I refuse to join. I don't want to be one of those people whose blogs languish, so I'll give an update -- whether it's needed or not -- for anybody who checks in here. But before I do, thanks for reading and being even occasionally interested in my words.

First, I've been busy in my day job as a technical writer. We're entering the last stages of a project that started almost a year and a half ago, and as I'm responsible for tracking the deliverables -- excuse me for lapsing into business-speak -- for a team of four writers including myself, I've been spending time tying up all the loose ends. Actually that project will go until freaking April 2010, and then there's a follow-on that has become almost indistinguishable from the current project that will deliver in July. Past that, the future at work is opaque except for version numbers that are higher than the version number of the product we're working on now.

Then I've been spending time every weekend working on my current novel project. I can't even remember whether I've mentioned it much on this blog. Briefly, it's based on several different ideas that go back as far as 1996, before I even started working on the first finished novel I wrote (Make Nice) from 1998 to 2003. I started working on this latest project with a final set of ideas I had about a year ago, and I'm about 58,000 words into it -- about halfway through, or a little less than halfway through. I'm more excited about this project than I have been about a project in a long time, both because of the plot, characters and setting on the one hand, and the fiction techniques I've chosen to use on the other.

Speaking of Make Nice, I'm thinking of self-publishing that too, to give fans an opportunity to buy it and to be able to give some copies to friends. Of course, I haven't sold very many copies at all of my other self-published books, How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, but more than 0, which is how many copies of Make Nice have been sold.

So if you're a reader of my sex story collections Too Beautiful and How I Adore You, you should like How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, even though they're rather different from the sex stories you're familiar with. It's still my writing. Still kind of funny.

That reminds me of something my erstwhile literary agent said when she had taken a first read of my Bangalore book (now titled Mango Rain), which contains one sex scene. Not having read my sex story collections, but only heard about them, she said that when the sex scene in the Bangalore book started there was a noticeable falling-into-place of tone, as if I was suddenly on more familiar and comfortable territory.

And that's one reason why I'm writing novels which are not all about sex (Lesbian Camp Girls, which is definitely all about sex, and How They Scored, which is only half about sex, notwithstanding). Writing sex stories was too comfortable and familiar.

So, back to the novel writing on the weekend.

Labels: novel writing, working

Sunday, November 22, 2009

'Co-working' at a normally closed café

Cool article from a St. Paul, Minn. paper about a group that co-works at a café that is ordinarily closed on weekdays in winter. Unemployed and freelance workers pay $40 to co-work at the café and get free coffee, AC power, and wi-fi every Tuesday. They has a Ning group website.

The café itself is apparently well-known and loved in the Twin Cities area.

technorati: co-working, crema

Labels: working

Saturday, July 04, 2009

Another road not taken

Why I never went to grad school

Labels: adolescence, education, film criticism, working

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

The corporate life: excitement division

One of the VPs at work sends around the news that management has taken to referring to "fiscal year 2010" as "FX." How annoying is that? Just a little less annoying than someone referring to 2010 as "oh-ten," which I've already been hearing.

In the same "newsletter" they're holding a contest to pick the new name for the internal document repository website. To generate excitement, "the person who submitted the winning name gets $100. Cash. In this economy, cash can be useful." Yes, but I thought the problem was that there's not enough credit. Whatever. You know what would be really exciting? Give another $100 to a random person who votes for the winner. Now that would inspire everyone to vote.

Finally, they offer the news that our division of the company will now be posting updates on Twitter, the better to "keep you abreast of product and customer news, expert commentary, bylined articles, podcasts, blog posts, speaking engagements, trade shows, and more." The only problem? Twitter is blocked throughout the company by IT.

technorati: twitter, companies

Labels: economy, twitter, working

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Career Day: Technical writer

Courtesy a post on the blog of the fabulous and attractive Janice Erlbaum, I came across these five generic questions. You can see for yourself how she answers them from her perspective as a full-time nonfiction writer; I thought I'd give them a try from my perspective.

0) What's your job?

Technical writer at a big software company. I write manuals that tell customers how to install, configure and use our products.

1) When you were in high school, was this the career that you were most interested in? If yes, how did you accomplish your goals? If no, how did you choose this career?

When I was in high school, I had never heard of the job "technical writer," nor was I interested in computers (very few people in the early to mid 70s were exposed to computers, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his recent book "Outliers," in which he says that the fact that Bill Gates was lucky enough to have a computer at his high school contributed to Gates' destiny), but I was definitely interested in being a writer, already working on short stories and plays. I was in the Creative Writing class in my senior year, and I had been keeping a diary since the beginning of my time in high school.

2) What is the education and training for this career?

Most technical writers I've met are like me: we have had little or no technical training. One of the maxims in the tech writing field is that you can train a writer about software, but it's very hard to train an engineer to write.

The training I had that contributed to my ability to do this job was, mainly, learning to write film criticism, and also training later in life as a high school teacher. From the first, I learned many good writing skills; from the second, I learned good ways to present information.

If you're a young person and think the job sounds good, I'd say the best thing you can do is work on your written communication -- clear, concise, unambiguous writing.

3) Can you please take me through a typical day that you might have?

I get to work around 9:00, screw around for a while reading email, then start tackling something that has to do with my job. There are several ways to start. I could:

Look at a bug report that points out something incorrect or lacking about one of the manuals I'm responsible for.
Look at a specification for one of the new features the engineers are working on.
Work on one of the lists I keep just to keep track of all the different things I have to remember, do, and plan for.

I'll work a few hours, and I usually have lunch around 1:00 or 1:30. There's often a meeting in the morning or afternoon that lasts from 30 to 60 minutes, in which I meet with other employees and share information about current projects, because it helps to have others' insights on how something works (or is broken, which is often the case). I'll work some more until 4:30 or 5:30.

The actual work consists of writing new material, or editing old material, in these software manuals -- which are between 40 and 400 pages of instructions on how to install and use our software. We write the manuals in FrameMaker, and I use a utility called SnagIt to take screenshots of the software as illustrations. We publish the manuals using Adobe Acrobat, creating PDF files, and that's the only way we distribute them -- we don't have paper manuals printed.

In order to write about the software, I have to install, configure and use it myself. I have to talk to software coders, testers and managers to understand why a feature exists and how it works. I have to read specifications -- documents written by engineers and managers that explain how the software should function, and what under-the-covers work they have to do to make it work right. Since those documents are written only for other engineers who are working on the guts of our software, I have to selectively take only the parts of them that the customer -- the "end user" -- will care about.

4) What do you like the most about your job? What do you like the least?

The best thing about this job is the high pay. Starting salary for a junior tech writer is in the 50-60K range. With over 10 years experience, I make over $100K.

The worst thing about the job is working for a huge company with bureaucratic systems that get in the way more than they help.

5) What is the employment outlook for jobs in this career over the next 3-5 years?

Not bad. I thought that after the software industry bubble popped in 2000-2002, I might never work in high tech again. But the industry recovered and I was hired again in 2004 and have been exmployed ever since. The current economic climate is plenty scary, and a lot of people in high tech are losing their jobs -- not me yet, fortunately. But the industry will come back when the economy does.

Other posts in which I write about technical writing:
* Other posts about technical writing

technorati: technical writing, working, jobs

Labels: technical writing, working

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Yes, it's lucrative

This post on Valleywag lists the going rate for H1-B visa workers hired by Microsoft, and includes the amazing statistics that a developer is paid around $115,000 while a technical writer gets $129,000.

Jesus! I don't make that much. But it is a pretty lucrative field, which provides certain evil consolation for the fact that it takes up all the time and energy that one might better spend being poor and writing novels.

Previously:

On sf.metblogs.com: Zyzzyva editor H. Junker was a technical writer before becoming a litmag editor

On Too Beautiful: What does a tech writer do?

technorati: technical writing

Labels: technical writing, working

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Clever is as clever does

I've been pretty quiet on this site this summer. There isn't much interesting going on -- I've just finished a big project at work that started at the beginning of the year, but it's just another tech writing project at an enterprise software company. It pays well but there is little to say; I wrote up a description a few months ago. I haven't worked much on my novel, I haven't been to any readings or performances, and the only travel I have in the future is to see my sick mother. My day is pretty much work, exercise, do chores around the house, and get to sleep. So, sorry for the lack of clever observations. There isn't much gas in the tank these days.

Labels: working

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Sayonara, CRTs

Today they asked everyone to put out their dead -- their old CRT-style monitors which have been replaced by flat-screen monitors. The aisles were quickly littered with them.

Labels: working

Monday, June 23, 2008

Overheard in SSF

Coming out of the men's room at the office, I passed the little alcove where a door leads to the fire stair. Standing in this alcove was one of the women who works here, standing with her face turned away from passers-by, saying urgently into a cell phone:

"It could happen anywhere!"

What small potential tragedy was she relaying, I wondered. But I went on and overheard nothing more. There are many little alcoves in our office where we seek privacy to deal with the outside world. No longer taking personal calls on our desk phones, because our cubicles offer only a little visual privacy but no audial privacy, we take our cell phones away to these little corners and vacant conference rooms, there to have furtive conversations with spouses, kindergarten teachers, doctors' offices, or the company we're secretly interviewing at.

I once shared a large office with three other people in the days before everyone had a cell phone. One of my co-workers received regular calls from her child's preschool. Once she picked up the phone for one such call, listened for a moment, and then asked: "Was it projectile?"

technorati: overheard

Labels: privacy, working

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

The only people that interest me are the mad ones

"... I certainly do envy you... The thing I'll always remember about this fellow" -- he looked from one to the other with a melting glow -- "is his inextinguishable gaiety. I don't think I've seen him depressed more than once or twice in all the time I've known him. As long as there's food and a place to flop... isn't that it?" He turned his gaze on me with unmingled affection. "Some of my friends -- you know the ones I mean -- ask me occasionally if you aren't just a bit touched. I always say, 'Certainly he is ... too bad we're not all touched in the same way.' And then they ask me how you support yourself--and your family. There I have to give up..."

We all began to laugh rather hysterically. Ulric laughed even more heartily than the rest of us. He laughed at himself -- for raising such silly issues. Mona, of course, had a different reason for laughing.*

"Sometimes I think I'm living with a madman," she blurted out, tears in her eyes.

"Yes?" said Ulric, drawing the word out.

"Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and begins laughing. He's laughing about something that happened eight years ago. Something tragic usually."

"I'll be damned," said Ulric.

"Sometimes he laughs that way because things are so hopeless he doesn't know what to do. It worries me when he laughs that way."

"Shucks," I said, "it's only another way of weeping."

-- Henry Miller, Plexus

* Miller's wife June -- "Mona" in the book -- supported them by gold-digging.

technorati: Henry Miller,artists,iconoclasm

Labels: art, depression, novelists, working, writers

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Never letting go

I've always been fascinated with unusual jobs, and the NYT Magazine feature from tomorrow's issue, with portraits of those who cater to the very wealthy, is chock full of doozies. My favorite is the nutritionist who "'go(es) over the menus of restaurants they're expected to attend, say, in the upcoming week and tell them what to order,' says Klauer, also known as the Park Avenue Nutritionist. 'That way, there's no guesswork. Before they even step foot inside a restaurant, they know what they're going to eat.'"

One of the things I like about this is her weirdly inflated use of the passive tense: not "restaurants they plan to go to" but "restaurants they're expected to attend," as if a meal at a restaurant is, for the super-rich, always a matter of obligation. I also like this idea that being super-rich means paying someone to look over your shoulder and play the part of a superego, telling you what you are and are not allowed to do.

technorati: nutritionist, restaurants, rich people

Labels: Republicans, working

Monday, March 12, 2007

Life's too short to squint

It's amazing how having a highly paid tech job can enable you to clear out a few annoyances. The monitor they gave me was too small after I got used to working on a big one at my old job, so after struggling with it for a couple of weeks, I ordered a new, larger one from Dell, only $310. It arrived today and after I set it up I felt much more productive. Now all I have to do is explain to my co-workers that I haven't received special treatment from the manager. I got it because I have "eye problems." Yeah.

In the past I probably would have felt it was my duty to just work with the smaller monitor. But the heck with it, I'm not going to struggle if I don't have to.

For those of you outside the Bay Area: It was v. warm all over California today -- about 75 in the city. Meanwhile I got email from a friend of mine in a small city in northern Japan: too cold and snowy to work outside today.

Labels: friends, weather, working

Friday, March 02, 2007

Saving daylight

Earlier this week I had to get up at 4:15 and be at work at 5:15 for a meeting -- the company is based on the east coast and the project manager there did not deign to take into account the fact that people out here in California are, like, sleeping then.

But not only did I survive this, I have got up at 4:30 twice more this week, including today, because there's no other time to do this contract work I got. And it's actually working for me. I can focus and concentrate. Already I'm done for today.

Now if only I can translate this into a habit and use the early morning time to work on my own writing. I do have a novel to finish.

Labels: contract work, technical writing, waking early, working

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Inflate, inflate!

Man, since I got my new job two weeks ago the air really went out of this blog. (Update: I just noticed that Badger recently blogged about this very phenomenon.) Let me explain. At my old job I would surf the web from time to time during the day, and post. At my new job I can't do that, not least because the company blocks access to many internet sites. So, sorry about that.

Last night I went to a book party for my friend Sara's book and took some pretty mediocre photographs. People cringe when they see me coming with a camera.

You can come to the big public party for Sara's book on Sunday.

Labels: blogging, literary events, working