Creatively Techie

Probably akin more to this

My husband and I are both creative souls, but in vastly different ways.  I write creative and not-so creative things.  I create beautiful things.  I sing.  He programs computers to do his bidding, codes long strings of letters and numbers that look like something that happens when I bang my head on the keyboard, and he makes pixels do interesting things on small screens.  He also complains that sometimes, when he talks about work, I glaze over.  I have this image of myself with my mouth drooped open, a tiny rivulet of drool headed down to my chin, with a vacant, after-the-lobotomy-in-one-flew-over-the-cuckoo's-nest stare.  I hope it's not quite that bad.

The truth is, when he starts talking in acronyms I know I'm in trouble.  I know a lot more about computers than many of my friends and family do, so when he talks about setting up permissions on his server I'm good.  When he goes into coding talk, I'm completely lost, but attempt - usually - to look as though I'm still paying attention.  Mentally, I'm preparing a shopping list for the craft store in my head.  Oh, right I need to get more of the 931 embroidery floss and I should look for a nice fluffy yarn for that scarf for Mom's birthday, maybe some homespun?.... Then I glance over at him and am getting the glare.  I've glazed over again.

Still and all, the talk has made some sort of a difference to me.  Recently, some of the basic templates at one of the companies I work for were redone.  Everyone else went "Meh, it looks mostly the same."  Me?  I went "Oh my god, look at all those rounded corners, that took hours!"  Because yeah, it does.  Not on graphics, but on tables and style sheets, those rounded corners are a real pain to get working correctly.  How do I know?  There was a Saturday devoted to that on the new website for my husband's IT business, Effortless IT.* You see, I finally convinced him that always giving away his services is counter-productive.

Just as I'm about to start giving away my own services, by creating free teaching videos for crochet instead of being paid for classes and lessons.  I do this with a higher intent in mind, of course.  As mentioned in a previous post, I am working on building up my application to become an "Expert" at DMS. I am still looking for ideas for future videos, by the by, if you have any suggestions.

The fun part of it all is, my creative outlet has become writing about a computer network/IT guy much like my husband.  In fact, very very much like my husband.  The wife in the story might even be kind of like me.  Her dad is definitely my dad. While the story is fictional, the people are people I know. It's the first time I've written something truly lifted from real people since a crazed fan/stalker thought sure my fiction was "real" back when I was in college and managed to look up and call my parents somehow to talk to them about it.  Talk about creepy.. and the only similarity in that case was that my story was about a girl who went to the same college as me. If you're interested in an excerpt, click the "Read More" below.


Do you write about real people in your fiction, slightly altered from their own reality?  Has it ever had repercussions for you?

*[[Thanks to learning when the glassy eyed stare starts, he's getting really talented at talking about tech subjects in a way that non-techies can understand.  Check out the blog on his site to see what I mean.]]