The Hazardous Precept

I'm often astonished by the work I've produced over the course of my careers. While I've usually been a tech guy for my primary job, it is the secondary work - the writing or other media work - that delivers the most reward. Reward not in a monetary sense - I'm not making mad cash writing or doing any of the other things I do - but in the sense of fulfillment. Working as an IT guy, security expert, systems engineer - those are pretty unrewarding jobs. You always find yourself fixing problems and seldom get anything back except possibly a sense of accomplishment for having deciphered the cryptic pattern hidden in a failure or fleeting thanks from a user who five minutes earlier insisted the problem was of your making. Writing for me is a personal activity, and maybe that's at the root of why I am not doing it more professionally anymore. I still write content for Columbus Parent on my subject matter - video games and playing games - but the bandwidth in the pub

I've had time recently to reflect on how I got to be where I am (or whatever) and that speeding train hurtling for the abyss led me to recall some of my earliest influences as a writer, and some conversations that led to me deciding to pick up the pen at a pretty early age. I grew up in a pretty large family (for those who don't already know that) a combined family of "his, hers and ours" and I was the oldest of the "ours" bunch. My father spent his entire professional career working in the media as a news photographer, so it was pretty common for me to be hanging out during the summer weekends at sporting events he was covering on deadline like the NHRA Spring Nationials or the weekend races at Mid Ohio (This was back when the Dispatch covered those events with real people, not just wire copy and AP photos). One of my favorite activities (aside from following dad into the dark room watching him print photos) was to wander the editorial pool and see who