When an engineer writes a short story
As a software engineer I've authored technical books and written software, so writing fiction should be easy for me, I thought. My plan was to do a MVP, that is, write a quick story, put it out for the world to see, and if there is a positive response, continue writing. It will be a humorous short story, I told myself. However, most of the humor was outside of the short story: the story took me over six months to write. Why? Scope creep and distractions. First distraction: could not find a mac text editor that I liked, so I started creating my own. This led to the creation of the Mac app: Published! Manuscript Manager (www.published-app.com.) I put it out in the Mac store and soon started communicating with a number of its users. First it needed a "submissions module" which authors of short stories would use to submit and track their submissions to various publishers. Then it needed an Income and Expense module which writers would use to track the profit/loss from each of their work. Each time I used my own text editor to write my story, I discovered some new enhancements that just had to be done, and finally when I reached the enhancement saturation point, and had about two pages of my story written, distraction #2 hit me: I thought, won't it be nice if I have a platform to display the fecundity of my mind to the world, if and when such fecundity occurred? Thus started my next journey: creating the web site www.mystacki.com, which writers can use to display "stacks" of their work.
Every good story should have a happy ending and mine does too. My fictional story "The Donkey Lane," is no longer fictional, an abstract Platonic idea up there in the sky: Its been written. Please do read it and provide feedback. "The Donkey Lane" http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RA3UD20