I’ve not been posting blog entries for a while mainly because I’ve been trying to decide what to be when I grow up. I’ve always wanted this blog to have some sort of professional angle, and to achieve that, I need to determine the professional angle of my life.

This may come as a surprise, considering I’m 35 and on my second career, but I’m not grown up yet. Far from it. Because I haven’t settled on what I want to be.

And my definition of being grown up has always been that grown up people know what they are.

My father was a diesel truck mechanic, and my mother was a deboner in a chicken processing plant.

For the past decade or so, I’ve been a specialist in safe online communities for kids. That involved everything from managing teams of chat room monitors to developing and executing online community strategies to creating online safety educational materials. I wrote some articles, presented at some conferences, and I thought I had grown up.

But in recent years, I’ve managed to switch careers. Now I’m these three things at Star Farm:

1) Associate Director of Development. I help other staffers develop their story ideas into multiple media. My focus is Interactive, meaning I help them develop their stories so that they will work well online and in gaming. This is how I keep one foot in my old career.

2) Visionary. I created a fantasy adventure property for Star Farm. My job now is to continue developing the story across several media, from books to gaming to film, and so on.

3) Writer. I currently spend much of my time writing the books (with a co-author) for the property I created.

When explaining what I do to people, it’s easiest just to say I’m a writer. A person can’t be more than one thing, can he?

In my adult life, I’ve done everything from load wood in a sawmill to directing Online Community at a startup near Wall Street to (now) writing fantasy books for children.

My father was a diesel truck mechanic. But he was also a father, an artist and a storyteller. And a charismatic story-gatherer.

My mother was a deboner, but she was also a mother, a childcare worker, a voracious reader, and a cross-cultural adventurer.

I’m a writer. It’s what I’ve been since I was in my single digits. The difference is that now I have the luxury of doing it as my day job. I’m also a cross-cultural adventurer, voracious reader, a story-gatherer. I’m an armchair sociologist and philosopher, a language geek. I’m a futurist. I’m a lot of things that aren’t going to fit into a neat package and form a single angle.

So I’m going to stop trying, and just write about some of the things that interest me.

Tags: career