Hi, I’m Bill Womack. I write. In fact, sometimes it seems I’ve been trying to tell a story my whole life.

As a kid, I haunted my mom’s office, clacking away on her big Selectric and chewing through reams of paper. In high school, I wrote skits and short plays, and in one fevered burst, an entire variety show. Those plays led me to stray from the written word, and into theater and film. By the time I got out of college, I was convinced that the visual arena was my playground, and my tales best woven on film.

I did a stint as a photographer, but got restless after a decade and went in search of some way to inject more motion and life into what I was trying to say. A photo gallery next door to my office in San Francisco hosted classes in some new software thingy called Photoshop. One lesson, and I was a goner. By providence or random chance, I was slap-dab in the middle of Silicon Valley when the digital revolution swept the planet.

At last! Anyone with a video camera could make a movie and find an audience, studios and distribution deals be damned. I immersed myself in all things multimedia and web-related, certain that this was the break I’d been searching for, a way to tell a story in my own unique voice. My wife and I started a web production company in San Mateo and set to work creating presentations for Apple, IBM, and Netscape, among others. I daydreamed, I designed, I programmed like a fiend. Then came the crash.

As the dot-com juggernaut ate itself at the turn of the millennium, I went looking for an escape hatch from the pressure-cooker of California. Relief came in the form of Portland, Oregon—a funky, literate, laid-back burg nestled in the jewel-green Willamette Valley. I slowed to subsonic speed, finally able to breath and stretch out a little. And then a funny thing happened… I started to write again.

Through all the side-trips down blind alleys, the story was there all along, patiently waiting for my return. I still commit the occasional website or logo design—skills are skills, and these still have value. But beneath it all I’m a writer, and after years of wandering, I’m home.