If you haven’t read the Legion Bulletin, here’s some important news for you. Sales were middling when I launched the Time Dogz series in April. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough. I needed them to be good to keep going as a full-time author. So I retrained, hoping to find a job in the software industry.

I’m still writing. Just at a slower rate of words per week. In fact, in some ways I’m enjoying my writing more, because it’s no longer carrying the treacherous burden of having to pay the bills.

Anyway, seeing as I’ve received such a wonderful level of support from my readers and friends in this readjustment to my life, I wanted to present a brief update on my job situation for anyone who might show some passing interest.

I’ve been working for a few weeks now as a software tester for a tech startup in a rather obscure town called Biggleswade. Which is bizarre because I used to live a few miles away in the tiny and even more obscure village of Dunton.

It’s been a big learning curve. Obviously. But I’m into the swing of things now and enjoying it. For those who like their techie details, I’m writing unit tests in Python using a framework called pytest. There is much json. And I am forever fretting about my fixtures. I’m also working in unix for the first time since the 1980s. Yes, I am really that old.

I wasn’t sure I was up to such things, so when I realized the Time Dogz sales weren’t going to be enough, the first thing I did was enroll in an undergraduate course at the University of Helsinki: Advanced Programming with Python. (You can take it online in English, Finnish and Swedish flavours). If I struggled with an undergraduate-level course, I reasoned, then maybe this was the wrong move for me.

I just received my results and I passed with the top grade. So I guess I’m not completely useless. 🙂