Brianna Skyler: Interview of Timothy Fish

Editor’s Note: Today I decided to turn my blog over to Brianna Skyler and she turned the tables on me. I fear I may be losing all control of the creative process with these posts.

Brianna Skyler:

Timothy, since you told me I could write about anything, I thought I would interview you, if you don’t mind.

Timothy Fish:

That wasn’t what I had in mind. I was hoping the readers would get to know you better.

Brianna Skyler:

In a way, they will be getting to know me better, since this is what I do in my day job.

Timothy Fish:

I thought they might be able to see a side of you they hadn’t seen before.

Brianna Skyler:

Oh, come on, this will be fun.

Timothy Fish:

For you, maybe.

Brianna Skyler:

I should have thought to bring a cameraman with me. O well, first question: Why novels? What do you hope to accomplish by writing a novel?

Timothy Fish:

Mostly, I think I want people to be entertained. Of course every novel has a theme and I want people to “get it,” but there’s just something special about a good story.

Brianna Skyler:

What’s the first novel you wrote?

Timothy Fish:

Searching for Mom is the first one I completed, but there were others I started on before that. I fancied myself a fantasy writer for a while and made it 60,000 words into a novel about two friends. One was destined to be this great hero and the other was off building a tower with designs on ruling the world.

Brianna Skyler:

Why didn’t you finish it?

Timothy Fish:

It was terrible. That and my hard drive crashed. I had a backup for part of it, but it wasn’t worth piecing it back together.

Brianna Skyler:

You aren’t a full-time writer. Tell us about your day job.

Timothy Fish:

I’m a Software Engineer. I get various responses when I tell people that. Some people know exactly what I’m talking about. Some people don’t really know but they are afraid to ask. Some people make it very clear that they are clueless.

Brianna Skyler:

What do you tell people who don’t know what a Software Engineer does?

Timothy Fish:

I think I like the answer my mother gives people best. She says, “You know how when the computer comes up it has a blank screen?” When they say they do she says, “He tells it what to put on the blank screen.” That is essentially what we do.

Brianna Skyler:

I understand that computers operate on ones and zeros, so how do you make sense of that?

Timothy Fish:

Well, that’s true, at the hardware level, but we rarely work at that level. Even Electrical Engineers do most of their work at a higher level. Instead, we work with programming languages. About the lowest level we will ever work at is Assembly language, but most of the time we can work with higher level languages that are more like English. Of course it isn’t really like English. It is more like the logic statements you might see in a proof of some kind. We type commands into a text editor and use software that figures out how to convert the text into the ones and zeros the computer uses.

Brianna Skyler:

That’s all there is to it?

Timothy Fish:

Not exactly. That’s what it takes to program the computer, but Software Engineering encompasses everything from developing requirements, to designing the software, to programming, to testing.

Brianna Skyler:

How many programming languages are there?

Timothy Fish:

I don’t know. There are a lot. I personally have used about forty different languages at some point in my career.

Brianna Skyler:

Why so many?

Timothy Fish:

Some languages are designed for specific purpose. There are some general purpose languages that can do just about anything, but they aren’t as easy to use for some of the tasks that the other languages were designed for.

Brianna Skyler:

Can you give us an example?

Timothy Fish:

Well, I’ve done quite a bit of work with discrete event simulation. A general purpose language like C++ or Java has the flexibility for doing that, but there are languages out there that have the stuff we would have to develop in C++ or Java already available to the programmer—things like the event queue and the clock.

Brianna Skyler:

I’m not real sure what that means, but I’ll take your word for it. How has your job impacted your writing?

Timothy Fish:

Obviously, Church Website Design is closely related to my career, so much so that I felt it necessary to get permission from my employer before I wrote the book.

Brianna Skyler:

What about with the novels?

Timothy Fish:

There really hasn’t been that much influence from my work. If anything, I’ve tried to avoid writing about my work in my novels. I think my church experience has influenced them more than my work. The most work has done is made it difficult to find time to write.

Brianna Skyler:

Do you ever see yourself giving up your day job so you’ll have time to write?

Timothy Fish:

I won’t say never, but it would take a major publishing contract for me to consider that. There are some aspects to my job that aren’t what I would like, but for someone like me, I have a dream job. Writing is fun and it is a nice outlet, but I don’t see myself not programming. Even if I were writing full-time, I would be doing programming projects on the side.

Brianna Skyler:

What kind of projects do you have in the works?

Timothy Fish:

Programming or writing?

Brianna Skyler:

Writing. We’ve bored everyone enough talking about your job.

Timothy Fish:

Right now, I’m working on a story about Kim and Martin.

Brianna Skyler:

Are you sure you want to do that?

Timothy Fish:

It seemed like a good idea when I started, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s too obvious. I’ve got a thread running through it about Kelly. That’s turning out interesting, but the main plot needs work. I’m not sure that I started far enough from the end. Either that or their children aren’t as believable as villains as they need to be.

Brianna Skyler:

Can you salvage it?

Timothy Fish:

I don’t know. I like the story, so I’m going to try, but there’s something about it that just isn’t right.

Brianna Skyler:

What happens if you can’t?

Timothy Fish:

Oh, I think I can. I just don’t know how yet.

Brianna Skyler:

I hope you do. And thanks for letting me interview you.

Timothy Fish:

My pleasure. Thanks for being here. I hope you’ll come again sometime and the readers will get to hear more about you and less about me.

Editor’s Note: Feel free to ask any questions you have for Brianna in the comment section. Brianna made her debut appearance in How to Become a Bible Character as a minor character. I expect her to have a more significant role in a future novel.