In October 2008 I quit.
I quit the job I had for 11 years. I quit dealing with the frustration of working for a corporation that was rife with petty squabbles and tug-of-wars that blocked any meaningful progress. I quit having to deal with being told every other month to lay more people off. I quit swallowing the anger I felt about C-suite people getting large bonuses, while people who could barely survive on what they made were being let go and losing their homes.
A lot of people probably thought I was stupid or crazy. Good pay, long tenure, no real chance they were going to lay me off (no matter how much I wished they would). But it was one of the smartest things I've ever done. Because by quitting that job I also quit having stomach aches every day from the stress and frustration. I quit being too short-tempered and grumpy with my kid. I quit smoking. I quit feeling like my life was all work and no play.
Once I got over the shock of quitting so many things at one time, I started.
I started spending more time with my daughter and family. I started thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I started eating better, getting more exercise and sleeping soundly. I started laughing more. I started getting my life organized. I started helping my brother figure out how to manage his vast amount of comedy material. I started searching for some software that would help organize my own piles of research material.
I'm a great fan of technology. What I was searching for was software that would help me store detailed information related to facts, characters, locations, bibliography, quotes, ideas, and post-writing information such as submission and publication information. And I wanted to also be able to categorize and subcategorize it, sort, filter, print, and link pieces together. I wasn't looking for a program to help me format a manuscript, screenplay or article. I found that there are some great programs on the market for that, but they focus on the format, not the peripheral material and information. I tested a lot of programs, read through pages and pages of product descriptions, blogs related to writing, technical reviews and customer reviews. And in the end I realized that what I was looking for just didn't exist.
So I started building two more things: Slam Industries LLC and our first product, Woubie. Woubie is the software I was looking for.
