Complex Numbers

Past Times

The noughties were a strange time for me.

I have a hard time letting go of the past. I've said it before, but all the "living for the present" rhetoric doesn't ring true for me; by the time you register something as being in the present, it's already in the past.

"Noughties" was my coinage, by the way. No one else seems to know what to call the first decade of the 21st century. Nothing else fits, so "noughties" it is - any year of the format 200* gets shortened to 0* and is, therefore, the noughties. It never caught on, partly, I think, because I'm utter crap at self-promotion. (Yes, I know that decades begin at the year ending with 1 and end 10 years later at the end of the year ending with 0, but popular usage works otherwise, so I'm sticking with that.)

But I digress. By 2004, my mother had been gone for five years, and my father was effectively gone, though it would be another four years before his body joined his mind. I was married, but otherwise adrift - I'd quit my job of 15 years and gone to work for someone else in the same field, but the change was still a difficult thing for me.

Having always had a thing for writing, it was in that year - 2004 - that I joined Writing.com. I don't know how it is for other people, but for me, whenever I told someone that I wanted to write and get published, they'd look at me like I was an alien. Or maybe they just felt pity for me, because getting published might as well be winning the lottery. Or they just figured there's no way an engineer can also be a fiction writer, possibly for reasons I touched on in my entry about knowledge and creativity a few days ago.

Thing is, I didn't have that problem here. Mostly everyone else on this site is in a similar situation - loves to write, isn't exactly Stephen King.

I learned stuff about writing. It's a mad, complicated process that it's impossible to get perfect at. As with cooking, there's always something more to learn, something else to incorporate. But that's not why I stuck around.

I stuck around because I made friends.

I'm not going to list them here, because, inevitably, I'll miss someone and they'll feel left out. But you know who you are, especially if I've met you in person. Hell, I've traveled all over the country and beyond meeting WDC people. There are experiences I'd probably never have had without the people I've met here, including sampling wines in California, seeing the final Space Shuttle launch (sort of), and staying in a house in England that's older than my country.

And I'm happy to add new experiences and people to the list, especially if you buy me beer.