I came in today from talking to our dock guy, we call him. The man who helps us maintain our small dock, and who is building us a small pier to fish off off. He asked me a question that most people do, to include people who know me well.
“Have you worked on a book lately?”
Even after 22 novels, people seem to think my work is a part-time hobby deal. If they don’t see me at a signing, or if they see me out in public, they wonder if I have thought about doing another book, when in fact, I’m never NOT writing or editing or publishing a book. It’s sort of my job. The average person, however, doesn’t see that as a fulltime job. How can it be? How hard can it be to write a story and put it up on Amazon?
But that’s okay. Want to know why that’s okay? Because they think it’s cool that I write books. If they think I write good stories easily, so be it. If they think I write them in a month, so be it. They are reading them.
I quit trying to explain much about the process, because eyes glaze over and readers really don’t care. It’s not worth explaining. Instead, I tell people, “I’m always writing on a book.”
“You don’t run out of ideas?” they ask.
“Nope,” I reply.
They are impressed, and I’ve not had to get into any sort of discussion of how books are birthed. They don’t really want to know. Come to think about it, they just want to know that I’m still cranking them out, and that’s okay with me.
I am encouraged by your dedication and how you are so committed to novel-writing as a profession. Did this commitment come before or after your first book was picked up by a publisher? In other words, did you commit before or after you “quit your day job”?
I committed after the day job. I started with short essay writing, then proceeded to the novel. When I could not master that, then I honed my craft doing freelance work. After a few years, I went back to the novel and realized I had advanced craft-wise, and I tackled the novel again. I decided I’d publish traditionally or not at all. Took me 2-3 years to grab an agent then a publisher. I put the writing first, but I was not against freelancing in order to bring in income. I still love freelancing and still do it to a certain degree, just don’t have as much time to do it as often.