This week I’m back to blogging about the love of my life – no, not my lovely wife, Sunny, although I must admit she’s the true love of my life. I mean I’m blogging about my fiction again.
People know me for a few different things: author, speaker, publisher. And since I ghost write books for entrepreneurs, a fair number of people have come to know me for that. Sure, I do smaller projects – blog posts, social media, marketing articles, and so on – but I really like working on the bigger canvas of a book.
So when I blog about writing, it could be about different types of writing projects. But, as my Twitter profile says, “When I’m not writing fiction, I help entrepreneurs write their marketing.” In other words, the fiction comes first.
How do I do it? Well, there was a time when it was a compulsion to write. My inspiration came from everywhere, and I wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of poems, songs, short stories, and then novels. I fell into fiction the way any writer does, I suppose – reading a wide variety of classics, falling under the spell of great writers, and wanting to weave those same kinds of spells on others.
It’s kind of interesting, but I never got any real accolades for my fiction; I was too young. In school, I was Class Poet, then editor of a high school and a college literary magazine. But those magazines featured mostly poetry of mine. It wasn’t until I’d finished grad school that I began writing my first novel.
Shooting for the Stars
At 25, I started writing Brothers’ Hand. Within about a year, I started Jana. I’ve told the story too many times, but suffice to say that I spent the next 20 years working on Brothers’ Hand, Jana, and finally Miles of Files. All told, each book represents around seven years’ worth of effort.
When I write effort, though, that doesn’t really express it. I mean labor, as in the kind of work that takes everything you’ve got. While my peers were going off and getting married and raising children in their 20s and early 30s, I went home night after night from my day job and spent the majority of my free time and effort working on my novels.
I’m proud of the results, and pleased that readers have responded to them. Of course, the only way to continue to sell books is to write more…and that means I’ve got to get busy on the next work-in-progress, Whizzers. I have a ways to go, but I’m going to keep shooting for the stars with it, just as I did with the first three novels. And I hope the final product is even better than the others.
