A good question. I’m a foodie, traveler, programmer and writer. I write fiction, ranging from literary stories to fantasy, that’s appeared in various small press publications since 1990 or so. A short story collection of mine, Why Coyotes Howl, was published by Sofawolf Press in January 2005.

I lived most of my life until the end of 2002 in and around Tampa Bay, Florida, from high school in Hernando County (about 40 miles north of Tampa) to college in Sarasota (about 40 miles south). While I was working on a general humanities degree, I’ve always been good with computers, having started back in 1978 with the TRS-80. The combined interests of writing and technology led me to work on small press magazines myself, and to a couple stints doing desktop publishing.

Career-wise I’ve spent most of my time as a “data analyst” (doing statistics and management on networks and user data) and a web programmer. I’d describe my skills as that of “webmaster,” which is not necessarily a good thing these days: someone who’s a mix of web developer, designer and server administrator, more of a generalist than many companies want in the post-dotcom world. I spent over five years at a telecom company in Tampa, then went to a network equipment company as a software engineer—really a web developer, as I was programming in PHP and Javascript—where I was laid off after about a year and a half.

This left me in an interesting quandary: I was having little luck finding work in Tampa at that point. I’d been considering moving to Northern California for years, and a friend out here offered me a room at his house to use while I looked for work out here. While the time might not have been ideal, it was likely then or never.

So, I moved to Silicon Valley, jobless, looking for tech work, after the crash. This was fully as nuts as it sounds. I spent most of 2003 working on contract doing data mining (that analyst thing again) for a virtual world startup. While there was certainly more web development work out here, the crash had left web jobs that were comparable in both requirements and pay level—adjusted for the cost of living—to the ones I had in Tampa very scarce. After the data analyst contract ended in 2003 with a rather cursory “our needs have changed,” I resolved to try to sell myself as a technical writer. I have the talent and I’ve been doing writing as part of my job for years, but I didn’t have the actual title technical writer very often, which made this a tricky proposition.

Nonetheless, thanks to networking through the friend whose room I’m renting, I obtained a freelance contract to do technical writing. While 2004 was an awfully lean year, it lead to a 15-month contract working at a major network equipment company creating documentation and maintaining a web repository of information on a large internal project. As of this writing (March 2006), that contract is just wrapping up, and I’m considering my options.

In addition to looking for work (I have an updated résumé available for those interested), I’m developing several online projects, including a text-only multiplayer roleplaying game and—just in planning stages—a revival of Claw & Quill, an online magazine I briefly ran in 2004, which I plan to recode in Ruby on Rails. As they say, stay tuned. As of right now I do plan to stay where I am in the Silicon Valley area, although I’m also attracted to the Pacific Northwest and would be happy to move for the right opportunity.

Watts Martin (March 2006)