Rage against the dying of the light

This year I made a resolution to read more books.

To be honest, I had always made that resolution every year, but in the end I didn’t always read as much as I wanted. I didn’t make enough time for reading, or I was too caught up with work, or I was doomscrolling on TikTok instead of reading. I had many reasons why I didn’t read enough. But this time I am reading for a purpose: I want to be a writer, and in order to be a good writer I know I should read more than I’ve ever read before.

I had always loved reading, and had always been drawn more towards the fantasy and mystery genre in my younger years. I enjoyed reading about wizardry and magic in Harry Potter. I dove into the world of Greek gods and goddesses in Percy Jackson. I had enjoyed uncovering clues and solving puzzles in the Mysterious Benedict Society series, and I loved learning about the unusual in Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children universe.

And while I still kept up my fantasy reads, from Wheel of Time to Stormlight Archive, in recent years I have opened myself up to other genres. About five years ago I started reading romance for the first time with the Jericho series from Ann McMan. I hadn’t realized it was a genre I would enjoy if I only opened myself up to reading queer romance instead of straight romance (I’m queer, and all I’ve known in books growing up was straight romance – it was not for me). Science fantasy was another genre that I didn’t know tickled my fancy, and while yes it is a subgenre in the sci-fi/fantasy genre, I didn’t know it was a particular flavor that I would love so much. My 5-star rated series in the last five years remains to be the Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin and The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, which are both science fantasy and very well written in my opinion.

Now that I’m in my late 20s, I have been thinking a lot about my other passion: writing. I think I started wanting to write ever since I started reading the first book I’ve ever read: it was Diary of a Wimpy Kid in 6th grade (I know that’s a bit late, I didn’t grow up reading books, or speaking English for that matter). And the first time I ever wrote something that isn’t for school was in my diary. When I started reading in the fantasy genre, I realized I can write stories too and not just about my life.

But writing died when I went to college. Well, I killed it. I stamped it down deep inside me because I had signed a contract when I was eleven years old that basically forced me to forget about writing, about taking up any humanities major in college. I was legally bound to take a science or technology related course, and that was what my path will look like for the foreseeable future—or at least that’s what I thought at the time. The only formal writing I had done since then have been my technical project write-up, and a few technical articles about software engineering.

And now I am kind of done with tech. There’s much to say, but this field has died—has been dying—since it stopped being about nerdy little projects and started becoming a profit race. And I know most other jobs won’t be any different, everything is about profit and everyone is measured by how much money you can generate for a company. But programming has always been a fun hobby since I was eleven years old, and I underestimated how much capitalism can affect how I enjoy it. And now I understand why people say don’t make your hobby into a job. (And here I am again trying to turn another hobby into something that pays.)

Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of people still love to problem solve and build solutions in the form of software. There’s a part of me that still wants to be a part of that, but I think there’s a bigger part of me that is just done with all of it. I think I had poured so much of my soul into something that didn’t give me the meaning I had been hoping to find, and now I want to spend my time doing something else. I want to be something other than a software engineer.

I’m still working in the field, I still have a full-time job. I know that realistically I can’t just drop everything and decide to write for a living. I know that writing, for most of us, is mostly a hobby that we would hope to someday pay, but until it does we have to just keep on keeping on. So that’s why I’m writing this today.

I thought I should hit two birds with one stone, so I decided to start this newsletter as a way to read more books and also exercise and improve on my writing skills. I welcome constructive criticism on my writing, as well as reader thoughts and opinions on the books I will be writing about.

I’m planning to post once a week on Sundays, and the first post after this will be about the Wheel of Time. If you’re interested, consider subscribing to my newsletter!

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Note: This was originally posted on Substack.