My days used to be straight out of Office Space, and my nights straight out of Misery. Here are all the gory details of how I spent my time during the day while writing books and stories at night.
(photo: Stephen King's Misery, a writer's nightmare if ever there was one)
(photo: Office Space, a programmer's nightmare if ever there was one)
Writers, take note: Unless you're already earning royalties on novels that enable you to take care of your family--or unless you have a companion willing to foot the bills--Don't Quit Your Day Job.
LOIS H. GRESH served as Technical Communications Director for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at the University of Rochester, where she created and programmed the original University Science Portal (then at www.science.rochester.edu), which was later transformed into the futurity.org site. She wrote close to 100 research stories, as well as a 100-page science book for the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) and a 50-page book for the Chemistry Department. For a decade, as Creative-Technical Director for computer consultant companies, Lois managed online training projects for Bausch & Lomb, Xerox, Kodak, RIT, the U.S. Government Small Business Administration, Time Warner, and others. Her work included shooting/editing 90 videos for Kodak, as well as training artists how to use special effects and touch-up software on films such as Men in Black 2 and Spider-Man. Most of her time was spent designing and programming systems, modules, animations, color schemes, and videos using C, JavaScript, PHP, Flash, Scorm, 3DS MAX and Final Cut Pro. Earlier, she was Lead Systems Analyst for the internet training sites of Element K, Micron, Adobe, Gateway, and Macromedia. For ten years, she operated Technohell, Inc., a computer consulting company for Kodak, Xerox, CyberMath, and others. Work included design and programming of hundreds of webpages and interactive demo sites, creating Oracle database systems, virtual reality programming, marketing analysis and strategy, digital photography, analyzing prepress color corrections, designing trade show strategies and demo materials, and writing speeches, sales guides, brochures, white papers, and training materials. She was a project engineer at Xerox handling fault tolerant analysis, circuitry, and microcode for boot, I/O, memory management, shared multi cache bus, operating system, and networking boards with associated peripherals. As Publications Department Manager at Computer Consoles, Inc., she handled all marketing and technical publications, and also programmed in C and Assembly. She was Manager of Publications, Training, and Systems Analysis at Bradford National Corporation in her teens and early twenties. For two years in her teens, she wrote and programmed more than 100 computerized medical newsletters for the National Institute of Health Library. At 16, she wrote and self-published a book about poverty. Her book,The Science of Superheroes (co-authored with Robert Weinberg), went to the international award level for best book of 2002. Lois won a Best of the Web OmniVision Award from Omni Magazine in 1996 for her work in internet-based virtual reality.
