Who am I and why writing?

So, a little bit about myself. I am a desktop support engineer for a trading company and have been there for 10 years now. I've been in the IT industry for just over 15 years and love messing around with computers and new operating systems as they come out. Before I got into computers I was a mechanic so I've been fixing things my whole working life.

What drew me into writing then?

I was unemployed for a couple of years before I started working with computers. I had just bought my flat when I was made redundant, so not good timing. I was never very good at interviews and dreaded the times I had to attend any. Before I started at my current job I was at a company for a couple of years as a contractor when the position I was in came up as a permanent role. My manager was happy with me and wanted me to stay, but the company still wanted to do interviews. I didn't get the job and I made up my mind then that I didn't want to have to go through interviews again. (Fortunately I was contracting at my current company when they offered me the role permanently without the need for an interview.)

After reading a few books and trawling the web I found the answer I needed. Passive income. Something in place where I could travel the world for a year and still have income coming in without having to do a thing.

After a while I had a list of things that could provide a passive income and writing was second on that list. The first on the list didn't work out so I began writing. And do you know what? I really loved it. When I was at school, (many moons ago), I had real trouble writing story's in the English class.  I would struggle to reach 2 sides of an A4 sheet of paper, so discovering now that I really enjoyed creating story's and finding it easy getting words down really surprised me.

I started writing short story's for competitions, had no luck, but lots of encouragement from the organisers about the story's. I then tried my first novel. It was created from a script that my friend had written about 8 years before. He kindly gave me permission and when I finished it I tried to get an agent.  Forty rejections later I decided to start my second novel.

Two years later and I was only two thirds of the way through.  Around this time I found Dean Wesley Smith's blog that changed my whole approach to the writing business.  It destroyed a load of myths that surround writing and getting published.  As I read through all of his posts I found a new path to being published that suited me perfectly as a new writer and techie.  And that is e-publishing.

So, that's how I got to where I am and over the next few posts I'l be going through my plan before I start publishing what I have already.