Having grown up on the early internet, where anonymity was king, I often forget that my history doesn’t begin when I make a new account. In fact, as the things in the digital world become increasingly entangled in our physical world, I get the impression some people might actually want to know who the people they meet online really are.
Pretty radical idea, I know, but I got a decent hunch on this one.
Of course, there’s a limit to how accurately we can speak about ourselves—our brains love to exaggerate and underplay both our positive and negative traits. And aside from the bias factor, it’s no fun to spoil all of the mystery, now is it?
In any case… Hello! I’m Connor McGwire, a Christian, programmer, and novelist. I hail from Everett, Washington in the Pacific Northwest of the US. A little industrial city spread along the shores of the beautiful Puget Sound and lying in the shadow of Seattle. I was in that general area from when I was born in 1996 to when I graduated from the University of Washington in 2017.
Life with my big, loving family was pretty easy, all things considered, and I don’t think I can ever be appreciative enough for such a blessing. I was brought up in a Baptist-adjacent teaching of the Faith, and have kept to the Faith my whole life—even as my commitment has waxed and waned at times, and especially as my understanding of it has changed quite dramatically in recent years (for the better).
As to what inspires me in life, I figured out my three primary subjects of interest about as soon as I was conscious of the world:
Swords
Computers
Storytelling
All three I attribute to my dad’s influence as he was the type to stick a copy of The Hobbit in my hands as soon as I showed any indication I could read… Which was at about 3 or 4 years old. He was also in deep on PC gaming in the 90’s and early 00’s, so I was 2 years old when I got my first throwing knife kill in Action Quake, sitting in my diaper in his lap. And when I was a little older, part of our homeschool curriculum was learning how to optimize the first two minutes of an Age of Empires II match (surprisingly relevant to any fast paced work). And to further add fuel to my fantasy loving fire, he brought my siblings and I to a local Renaissance Fair, where my brother and I got proper wooden swords.
I learned to write almost as quickly as I got the reading thing down, so I was putting together stories about my favorite Neopet at the age of 5. And all around I have always had an overflowing need to create through whatever medium strikes my fancy: LEGO’s, crayons, Microsoft Word, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater level editor—anything. There are cool ideas in my head and they need to get out.
Unfortunately, I was easily distracted and incredibly particular about quality, so I abandoned my projects more often than not.
In any case, it’s probably no surprise that I decided around the age of 8 that I was going to be a video game developer or work on Office software at Microsoft. By high school, though, I could see how competitive both of those fields were in my area, and I became less certain of the whole “professional computer guy” plan. Thus, even though I graduated with an Associate’s Degree at 18, I decided to take a gap year to work.
After 9 months on a mirror assembly line, I hastily dusted off the plan and went to go get a Bachelor’s in Computer Science.
It’s probably worth noting at this point that despite my frequent storytelling ventures, I never considered a career in writing. I kept doing it on occasion, but usually in support of my game development efforts.
After graduating from college, I signed on with an IT Consultant firm in Manhattan, spent three months there for training, then they put me in Boston to work for a private investment bank. Ended up being there for nearly three years—years that I look back on fondly.
Boston is a nice place. I had fun exploring and my work and coworkers were great. During that time, I learned a lot of interesting things in history, science, and art. And at the tail end of those years, all those bottled up “cool ideas” demanded to manifest in some form. I tried putting them into a game I was working on, but that was taking too much work for the level of narrative complexity I wanted to try my hand at. So, that was when I finally started a real effort to write a novel.
However, despite all the nice things in that time of my life, I was also not doing so hot with the fundamentals: I wasn’t going to Church, I was barely even praying, my social life outside of work rarely consisted of more than playing games online with my friends… My foundation was slipping and my overall outlook was sliding down with it.
Now, I will say that I’m glad to have kept up my connection with those friends. They’re guys I grew up with and they’re a bunch of fine lads. But I certainly wasn’t getting closer to finding a wife (for one) when they were the only people I was spending any of my free time with and the rest was spent alone. Balance and variety was needed.
Unfortunately, my efforts to fix that while staying out East were thrown into chaos come March 2020 and that little global health crisis that you may have heard about. Tried to bear with my particular situation for a few months, but by July I just couldn’t handle being stuck in my little rented room, far from anyone I truly trusted, with all the world hanging in uncertainty—more than usual. Thus, I hotfooted it back West to be around family again, as they were all dealing with their own lockdown related shake-ups.
People I knew were already slowly getting priced out of Washington before 2020, but by halfway into the year, pretty much all of my family and closest friends had left. My parents were part of that exodus, and I needed a cheap place to stay for a short time while I found a new job, so I ended up staying with them in Tucson.
That “short time” then became “three years.”
After the first six months I managed to land a job with Raytheon Missiles & Defense. However, in January of 2022, Raytheon decided that it was finally time to make vaccination mandatory for continued employment…. You know, two years after the initial outbreak and despite us walking around the buildings without masks on for half of 2021…
Reflexive sarcasm aside, I was rather ambivalent about vaccines themselves at the time—I still don’t see any issue with a properly made inoculant.
What I have a little bit of an issue with, is a big, profit-chasing, military contracting corporation “encouraging” me to get myself injected with some rushed-out, experimental medicine made by a big, profit-chasing, pharmaceutical corporation who was likely cutting corners on production…
But Raytheon hardlined on that policy, so we parted ways.
The following year and a half proved to not be the easiest time to find work in my industry as the tech sector took a double dose of existential crises:
The whiplash of reality catching up to the reckless, speculative spending of the pandemic boom.
The advent of ChatGPT ushering in a new era of fad chasing that makes the .NET bubble look like disciplined investment.
I didn’t sit around twiddling my thumbs, though. From that February to June I was in a delirious haze of working on my novel: 8-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. After the 10th full editing pass or so I decided it was ready to print and self-publish.
The release didn’t set the world on fire, but I really just did it to say I did and I’m quite happy with what I accomplished and learned.
And the main lesson, is that it is absolutely worth paying a professional proofreader. Truly. The more words you have, the more true this is. I hit 180,000.
I also made a full featured preview of a video game on my own, which ended up being the most demanding technical challenge I’ve ever accomplished. So, that was neat.
The game development thing was something I was actually thinking I might be able to get somewhere with income-wise, but before I could really follow through on that, my body gradually and then suddenly decided it was utterly fed up with the dry climate of a desert and would rather let my hands blister and crack apart than let me continue to try and live there…
One more hastily planned exodus later, and I’m now up here in Salem, Oregon, reunited with my beloved, cold, wet, dark, frog weather.
I still have lots of things personal and professional to work on, but I have to say: this last year has been rather wonderful and things are turning out quite well: I got a solid job with the State of Oregon; I will finally be getting baptized at the local Catholic parish this Easter (a long story for another time); I’ve got an active social life again; and I’ve rewritten the first part of Metanoia with all the lessons I’ve learned since that first attempt (to be released March 1st!).
Now here I am on Substack trying to drain this overloaded brain of all the “extra” thoughts it generates during other activities—hopefully where at least 2 other people can be entertained by it. And, to that end, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that there a lot of cool people in this corner of the net. So, that’s neat.
I look forward to getting to know you all.
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