Official NaNoWriMo 2005 Winner
Autosurfer by Erich Schneider

Mon Sep 5 04:15:02 PDT 2016

I firmly believe that every home page should have a blurb describing the author's life so that when people run into each other they can skip past the boring basics and jump straight to that awkward phase of not knowing what to say.

My life, the latest: October 2023

Hello. I'm John Truscott Reese, an unpublished, future-critically-acclaimed writer of speculative fiction, just coming off a 24-year side project of teaching computers not to destroy themselves.

The London placement I mentioned in the last installment ended early, and I returned home, sad to have jerked my cats around by flying them to another country for what turned out to be only a three-month trip, but happy to see my special lady friend again. The Robinhood job ended in October, 2022.

When my disgruntlement at Google began, I remember thinking: it would be nice if I had the option of not working, so that I have multiple exit paths. And that idea wormed itself into my brain. I read up on how to retire early -- how much money you would need, and how to manage it. I read about FIRE, which is a model for financial independence and retiring early by cutting back heavily on your expenses, and the more appealing FatFIRE, where you use the same math, but more money, to live well without working. And due to, maybe, hard work, but also, definitely, a lot of luck and a few years of planning, I've reached the point where I don't need to work anymore to live the middle class lifestyle to which I've become accustomed. I don't have a firehose of money that I can tap any time I want to travel the world, or eat ridiculous food, or donate to political causes; those things require a little more planning now, but I have time to plan and be intentional.

I've been working on finding the right amount of structure to enjoy free time but still do creative things. I have been making shrubs (drinking vinegar) with fruit from the farmer's market, barrel-aging cocktails, learning Portuguese and Esperanto on Duolingo, trading options, doing daily free writes, and nerding out on notebooks, pens, credit card optimization, and the structure of fictional narrative.

Sometimes I sit down for hours to read or write (though I get up at 10 minutes to the hour, every hour, to walk around in circles for 250 steps, when the Fitbit tells me to); once in a while, I take an edible and wander around the city listening to Ken Nordine's Word Jazz.

I'm ramping up for National Novel Writing Month by re-reading the novel I've been working on for 22 years, which is now 1090 pages long, and my plan is to write to the climax this year.


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