I have often thought about writing fiction. More accurately, science fiction. I started reading science fiction books after a librarian introduced me to Robert Heinlein when I was eleven years old. Some summers, I read a paperback book cover-to-cover every day, until I started getting jobs that kept me too busy to read. But I thought that one day I would be a writer like Heinlein.

My life took several different paths before I started writing regularly. And then what I wrote were manuals for microcomputer hardware, designed for writers of device drivers. Such dry stuff paid the bills, but I was careful that what I wrote wasn't ever fictional. I graduated to writing books about UNIX, then to writing magazine articles. But still little in the way of fiction, if you ignore A Day in the Life of a System Administrator.

I did take some writing classes, starting in 1994. My wife, Rose Moon, kept encouraging me to write, based on some of the little stories I had written at a writing salon sometime later. By 2012, I started collecting notes, and what I think Stephen King called "starts", the beginning of longer stories or even novels.

King wrote that it might take him years to convert a start into a novel or novella. I was taking longer, because I had a couple of problems. One wasn't exactly a problem: I was accustomed to writing for money. Writing fiction was generally a good way not to make money, especially when I could write for money. The second was the type of paid writing I was doing: mostly short, terse, technical articles. Moving from concise to flowing, interesting, non-technical stuff that was many times longer than a magazine article--two to three thousand words, unless you are writing for The Atlantic--just seemed impossible for me.

But things change. I no longer am writing magazine articles, or editing ;login:, so have started writing some science fiction. I haven't finished anything yet, but did want to post an example of one of the more finished things I have been working on. The Enclave is one of the more complete sections of a novel about what happens after a singularity has taken place. Not the one that Ray Kurzweil has been writing about, but something different. I suggest you take a look.