7 Novels Deep: How X-Team Developer Jesse Bangs Writes Sci-Fi in His Spare Time

Jesse Bangs had been writing since he was a child — imagining worlds, building histories, dreaming up characters. He spent years treating all of it as something separate from "serious" work. Then one morning in his early 20s, the fiction broke through.

"I woke up and realized that the only thing preventing me from writing a novel was the need to actually sit down and do it," he says. "And so I did."

That first move produced seven completed novels, all published under the pen name J.S. Bangs, all before he joined X-Team last September. When he arrived, he was already deep into his eighth. Bangs is a programmer by trade and a novelist by discipline — and the two pursuits, he's found, have more in common than they might appear.

In this story, Bangs shares how he structures his writing life around a full-time job, why he chose indie publishing over the traditional route and what he thinks it actually takes to finish a novel.

The Outline Is the Work

Bangs writes structured fiction. He does not improvise.

He tried writing as a "pantser" — a writer who makes the story up as they go, the approach famously favored by Stephen King — and it failed completely. "About a third of the way through I had to give up," he says, "because I would sit down and try to write, but I just wound up staring at the page without the foggiest idea of where to go next."

So he switched to outlining, and he does it in detail. His current project began with a 7,000-word outline — nearly 10% of the projected final manuscript length — before he wrote a single narrative sentence. The chapters come next, taken one at a time from what he's already mapped.

Idea creation, by contrast, is entirely passive. History, technology, video games and other fiction burrow into his imagination and eventually reassemble into something new. He recommends Ursula K. Le Guin's essay "Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?" to anyone who wants a deeper answer than he can give in a short interview.

Fitting Fiction Into a Full-Time Schedule

The practical logistics of writing eight books while working as a programmer come down to a single rule: put it in the schedule.

Bangs blocks out 90 minutes each morning for writing. He admits he still misses that window more often than he'd like. The key, in his view, is refusing to quit when you miss it. "The most important thing is not to give up," he says. "Regardless of how long it takes, I'm determined to actually see this novel to its completion."

X-Team's Unleash+ budget — a benefit the company offers for developers to pursue learning and personal growth — has helped on the reading side. Bangs has used it to build his library. He views wide reading as a direct input to the writing itself, not a separate hobby.

The geography adds another layer of texture to his story. Bangs writes English-language science fiction and fantasy from a small village in Romania — where he has lived for the past five years with his wife, a Romanian native he married after his fourth visit to the country, and their two children.

Why He Chose Indie Publishing — and How to Do It Well

With seven books published, Bangs has a firm view on the traditional-vs.-indie question. He chose self-publishing not by default but by reasoning through the tradeoffs.

Traditional publishing handles editing, cover design and marketing — and costs the author little out of pocket. But it offers no guarantee that a manuscript ever sees readers. "Basically everything you write comes with the huge caveat of 'probably no one will ever read this,'" he says, unless the author already has an established contract. Indie publishing flips that. The author takes on quality control, design and marketing, but the book enters the market without gatekeepers.

For writers considering that path, Bangs offers two pieces of advice. First: know your genre. Readers of self-published books tend to be voracious genre fans who know exactly what they want. The market rewards writers who understand which conventions their audience requires and which ones they can safely subvert — and who can deliver both familiarity and surprise within the same story.

Second: write well. "Readers still prefer quality," he says, "so maybe the most important thing is just to write well."

His single biggest piece of advice for anyone who wants to write a novel? "Butt in chair and write." Seven books and an eighth in progress suggest the advice works.

You can find Jesse's books on Goodreads under J.S. Bangs.

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