Read to Write

I'm at my desk a lot. I'm an introvert. I like people and a lot of them don't know I'm an introvert, but I am one all the same. I also get bored while at my desk. However interesting my job, I can't be immersed in it for long stretches. I come up for air a lot. When I do, I find myself at the 21st Century water cooler slash magazine rack, and on one such recent visit I found an online magazine of Historical Fiction and Alternate History. In theory, this is just what I've been wanting.

In theory, because I don't know the quality yet, or what I will find catches the market's imagination ... or if I can really stand reading on my phone's Kindle app. I've used the app for things but I really wanted to order this in a real live paper format. There's something about ... But I know where that would lead. It would lead to the book lying under my bed collecting dust, as several others now do, because all too often I just can't be bothered physically getting up to go get whatever it was I was reading when I was last in the same place as the physical book I was last reading. Y'know? Whereas this infernal Samsung device with the Snapdragon SOC goes with me almost everywhere.

(Major competitor, by the way. Smartphone and tablet SOCs are what the boards my team designs and builds are tested and their software developed on. But not Qualcomm, needless to say. They're the big competitor that AMD and Motorola were way back, way way back in the day before the day. Now and then my LinkedIn account, long may it languish, gets some sort of recruitment mail relative to Snapdragon development.)

History fascinates me the most -- what happened, why it happened, who made it happen. There is a story behind everything and if you look at it from the right angle, every story is interesting, maybe even educational. It's a common practice in this society to complain about current events and the people who drive them, but if you look at fictionalizations you see it's all driven by character and happenstance -- all of it, everything happening everywhere, and the bad guys are not really bad, and the good guys are just normal people. So yeah, I pretty much ignore those pithy Facebook distillations that tell us how awful various people are. They annoy the fuck out of me, even when put up by people I like and respect. (Well, they don't always, but they usually do.) Their popularity, nay, their very existence, is a clarion call to historians, writers, and educators everywhere that the people in this society don't know shit and we need to find ways to fix that. Maybe.

Well, my way would be through putting people in others' shoes. That is, if I was a writer. Meanwhile, as a dreamer, I can surely read what the writers write. And it's a step towards writing more than just this drivel.