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Re: Post about a creative writer who went into tech writing for a spell
Subject:Re: Post about a creative writer who went into tech writing for a spell From:Ryan Young <ryangyoung -at- gmail -dot- com> To:Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> Date:Fri, 23 Oct 2015 16:12:28 -0700
It seems like he never intended to stick with it as a career, though:
One colleague remembered Pynchon as ornery and solitary on the job. But he
> managed to turn in V. eighteen months after signing the contract, meeting
> his own arbitrary deadline on the nose. After a few months of intense
> editing by mail, he used the $1,000 to quit his job at Boeing, vowing never
> to work for a corporation again. He called it his âescape money,â and he
> wanted to make it lastâby running again, this time to Mexico.
I've also read an account of him hiding under a sheaf of blue prints while
at Boeing, though that might be apocryphal.
On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 1:24 PM, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
> I had a head start on knowing about it, my father being an engineer. But
> when I looked into the field, I was told by some on-campus industry
> recruiters that they liked their writers to be people with technical
> backgrounds who had spent some time working in tech fields before becoming
> writers (this was back in the late 60's). So I got my BSME and went to
> work as an engineer.
>
> I was a fairly decent engineer, got reasonable raises and advancement, but
> 15 years later was still an engineer - and was doing most of the
> documentation in the R&D groups I was working in. So when the aerospace
> boom ended, I finally got round to becoming a writer in the semiconductor
> industry, and within a year I was a tech pubs manager. Probably shouldn't
> have waited that long to make the transition.
>
> Gene Kim-Eng
>
>
>
> On 10/23/2015 12:34 PM, Lin Sims wrote:
>
>> I didn't even know there was such a thing as tech writing until my final
>> year in college.
>>
>
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