Irene Smith

Are we having fun yet?

Five years ago I moved back to New York State from Redmond, Washington. It seems like yesterday. I probably wouldn’t have given it a thought but this year is the tenth anniversary of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and that got me to thinking about time…

The first time I participated in NaNoWriMo, I was in an airplane on the way from Washington to New York. We were coming home. 2003 was not a great year for us. My mother-in-law passed away, my father had a stroke, and we pulled up stakes and moved across the country. On the other hand, we really wanted to move back. When we moved to Washington we thought that we would be back to visit much more often. The best we could manage was once a year. Not enough! We moved back because my Dad had a stroke and Mom needed someone to help with the printing business. It was a good excuse. We missed the family too much and didn’t want to be a continent away.

The only good thing about 2003 is that it is also the year when my first short story was sold (for three dollars and change!) and published at a web site called Alien Skin (http://www.alienskinmag.com) in their November issue.

It has been nine years since we moved out to Washington. I was working in Newburgh at a company called CRS Retail Systems. When I looked around and saw that what they were paying me was about 17k per year less than the average for someone with my experience, I posted my resume on Monster.com and was hired by a contracting company in Washington. I took the job because it was a 50% increase in salary but, more importantly, it placed me as a contract employee at Microsoft.

And speaking of tenth anniversaries, this web site celebrated its tenth anniversary back in July. I purchased the domain irenesmith.com back in 1998 when the cost to register a domain was $35 per year. The site has gone through a bunch of re-designs over the years and has had widely varying amounts of attention from me, but it is still here.

[Edit 21 Oct 2008] I goofed. I thought I bought this domain in 1998. I was at whois today and it turns out that I actually bought the domain in July of 1999 so… that means the Tenth Anniversary is next July and that gives me a chance to do something special. I don’t know what yet, but you will all be the second to find out.

It has been 12 years since my son was born. I can’t even begin to tell you how frightened we were when he was born nearly three months early. His due date was December 22nd and his actually birthday is in the beginning of October. This is what he looked like back then…

Matthew at about 3 weeks.

Of course, you wouldn’t know he weighed less than three pounds when he was born if you looked at him now.

It has been 14 years since I got married and also 14 years since my video games were published. When those games came out in the summer of 1994, they were released on 3.5″ diskettes. (Who even has a diskette drive any more?) The games were written for Windows 3.1 using Visual Basic 3. They weren’t anything like today’s games, of course, since I’m only one person and don’t have the equivalent of a movie studio working with me but I think they were fun. Here is a screen shot of my solitaire game:

My Solitaire Game

The games (Video Solitaire, Dice Games and Casino Games) came out in 1994, obviously not long before Windows 95, and were actually available in stores for four years. I stopped receiving royalties in 1998 but I actually found a copy of one of my games in a K-Mart in Seattle, Washington in 2001. I didn’t get rich from them, but the year they were selling the fastest we actually lived on the royalties.

It has been 20 years since my first computer programming article was sold. It was published in January of 1989 but I sold it in June of 1988. Either way, I made good on my vow to be published before age 30. As is usual for me, I cut it really close. The article came out in January and I turned 30 in September.

It has been 23 years since I met my husband. We were introduced by his Aunt who set us up on a blind date. The minute I saw him for the first time, I fell in love with him. We were so intent on talking to each other that night that, although I know his aunt and uncle were there and some other couple that they knew, we might as well have been alone. We talked to each other non-stop from the moment he sat down at the table until he dropped me off at around 2:30 in the morning. And we have been talking non-stop ever since with no end in sight.

It has been 25 years since I bought my first computer. I had been playing video games on an Atari 2600 and watching the William Shatner ads for the Commodore Vic 20. When I went to the store to buy the Vic 20, they were out of them but they had something called a Texas Instruments TI/99-4A. It had 3k of RAM and also used cartridges.

By October, I outgrew the TI/99-4A and bought myself a Commodore 64. For those of you who don’t remember (or weren’t born yet) when you bought the C-64, you got the computer. No storage device, no monitor, no software. The computer looked like just a keyboard because the CPU, memory, and all of the hardware was in that keyboard and it connected to a standard television set. If you wanted to actually SAVE your programs, you had to buy a disk drive or, if you didn’t have a lot of money, a cassette drive.

I bought the cassette drive and the rest is history. Just think, if disk drives had been cheaper, I probably wouldn’t have learned to program. I really bought the computer in the first place because I had heard that computer games were much better than what you could play on the Atari 2600. Unfortunately, once I bought it, I quickly found out that there weren’t too many video games on cassette. I started buying computer magazines so I could type in the game programs they had listed in them. It is not a huge leap from typing in programs to writing your own. You wonder, what would happen if I changed the way that worked and the next thing you know, you’re writing programs of your own.

I think I’ve gone far enough. If I tell you that it has been 31 years since I graduated from high school, you’ll think I’m really old. If you had asked me in 1977 what I would do for a living and where I would be in 31 years, I don’t think the answer would have been anything close to the truth. So much for my powers of prediction.

NOTE: This vignette was written as an exercise for the Practice-W mailing list. The exercise asked us to remember a time when someone’s faith made a difference in our lives.

“Hey, when are you going to take your writing seriously?”

“I spend every spare minute I have writing,” I replied as my fingers danced across the keys. “How much more seriously can I take it?”

I was in the middle of creating yet another story that would be consigned to the bit bucket the minute it was finished. Home from work for the Fourth of July holiday, I had been working from the moment I finished my morning coffee. My husband came into the spare bedroom we had turned into a home office and sat down next to me.

“You had your first non-fiction article published almost fifteen years ago. How many short stories or novels have you submitted?”

“None.”

“Exactly my point. When you decided to write non-fiction, you sent it out so people could buy it. With fiction, you write the stories and then leave them sitting on your hard drive. Nobody ever sees them.”

“They’re not good enough. I’m not ready,” I launched into the familiar list of excuses. The truth was that my first two programming articles, written on speculation, were accepted. After that, I wrote on assignment. Now I was afraid of the rejection. Finally, as my list sputtered to a stop, he leaned over and kissed me. “I think you’re wrong,” he said. “In fact, I’m so convinced that your stories are good, and that you can be a successful writer, that I’ve put my money where my mouth is.”

He placed a check and a piece of paper on the desk in front of me. Curious, I picked them up. The check, for one hundred and twenty-five dollars, was made out to the Romance Writers of America. The paper was a completed membership application that only needed my signature.

I don’t believe in magic, not really, but sometimes it takes someone else’s belief to allow you to believe in yourself. We mailed the application on July Fourth, Independence Day. By the end of July I had submitted several stories, and by the middle of October, I had made my first sale. I still think that if my husband hadn’t made such a concrete declaration of belief, I would still be dreaming about writing fiction. I may not be able to quit my day job yet, but I’m on my way.

Copyright © 2004, Irene Smith.