Last night, I dreamt that on the flight home from Portland, Oregon to Sacramento, California, I wound up sitting next to Stephen King. Now, I’m not sure why Stephen King would be flying on the Greyhound of the Skies, but hey, it was a dream. Who cares about that sort of detail?

 I am an aspiring writer — okay, granted, I don’t write nearly as much as I used to, but I still churn out something every now and then. I’m not as productive as I was just six months ago, when I was regularly putting out a thousand words a day working on a novel, but I have hopes that I can regain that sort of productivity again soon. In my dream, I remembered that there’s a part of me that wants to be a bestselling horror writer, so sitting next to Stephen King was a great thrill for me. And at the end of the flight, we got off the plane together, went to a coffee shop, and sat and chatted for a long time. I even got to introduce him as a friend when my parents showed up at the same coffee shop.

So Stephen King and I sat and chatted about life, the universe, and everything. Of course, I really wanted to ask questions and get his insights into writing as a career, about what to do when you’re stuck on a novel, about how to track down an agent, about how to cut down on bloated verbiage (okay, so maybe Stephen King isn’t quite the right person to ask for advice on that problem), and so on. But did I get around to it? Nope, of course not.

It’s a good thing that I don’t feel the same way about my writing career as I do about my web development career! While I’m quite content to let various ideas and stories fester in my mind and set down notes and develop them later and turn them into publishable books and stories a few years from now, I have an overwhelming impatience with the state of my development career. I love my job right now, and it’s definitely a step in the right direction (although, as I’ve said before, I would like to learn more programming and PL/SQL). But I can’t shake this feeling that says that this is where I should have been five years ago. If I’d been here five years ago, then today I would be where I want to be now: project management and director of development, or something like that.

I keep reminding myself to have patience. Five years ago I was in a completely different place in my life, and my priorities were completely different. Five years ago I was giving no thought at all to my career, and I just wanted to go to work, punch in, do my thing, punch out, and go home. As long as I was getting the money I needed to survive, I was happy.

At the time, I also had a vague sense that I was interested in Human Resources. And when I actually settled down at got a "Real Job" I ended up doing Human Resources, primarily by pure accident rather than intent on my part. And found that I didn’t really enjoy it. And now I have a new job in a new career which I actively sought out and got on my own, which is something that most people never get a chance to do. And with this new job comes a paycheck which, I recently discovered, is well above the median household income for people my age. But where I want to be is still far in the future; and there’s still a part of me that is angry that I’m not quite there even yet. How absurd is that?

To be honest, none of Stephen King’s books have ever really scared me that badly. I enjoy them because I think, when he’s at his best, he’s good at using horror as a metaphor to explore human emotions. I think that perhaps he could write a really terrifying novel about a demon called Impatience, which causes its victims to, oh, get so insane from impatience and envy that they go nuts and, say, go out and become killer clowns or something.

Or, who knows? Maybe some day I’ll write it myself.