GENREALITY

At what moment did writing, for you, turn from being just a hobby to play around in to something you took seriously enough to create a salable novel, and a resulting career?

Writing has never been a hobby for me. From the moment I started writing I wanted to be published. I wanted it to be a permanent career.

That said, I didn’t start writing until around 2002. That doesn’t mean I’d never given it any thought before though. I can remember laying in bed when I was sixteen years old, trying to decide what I wanted to do for a living. I wanted to own a clothing store, I wanted to be a radio DJ, I wanted to be a travel agent, but somewhere in there was the thought that I also wanted to write a book. A book. I never thought of actually being a professional writer or of writing more than one book, or even what kind of book I wanted to write. It was just a sparkle of an idea amongst many.

After a year of doing nothing after high school, I went to college for Business Admin because I still couldn’t decide what I’d wanted to do. All I knew for sure was that I wanted a job where I would have some control over what I did. I wanted to be the boss. Then I discovered bartending. I quit college and never looked back.

When I was 24, I took a 6-part night class on non-fiction freelance writing, mostly because I still liked to learn. It was more about research and how to use the same research to write several articles that you could sell to various publishers. I never did write anything after I took that class though. I was too busy traveling and living life to write about it.

Then when I was thirty I took another 6-part night class. This one was on writing romance. I was excited about it, and I even started a story. Well, I outlined one-as that’s what they said was the first step. It’s very telling that after that first outline was written I never did write that story. In fact, after that I stopped thinking about writing again for a couple more years. Then finally when I was almost 33 years old, I was sitting in the bar (at work) bored out of my mind waiting around for customers to show up so I could make some money. I was thinking I was getting too old to depend on tips to pay my mortgage so I was searching the want ads for a better job when an ad that said “Make Money with Your Writing” caught my eye.

I checked it out and signed up for the correspondence course that promised I would make my money back by the time I’d finished the lessons or they’d give me a 100% refund. (If you want to know more about the course I took, you can find a link to it in the comments from this post ) The rest, is history. I decided to go after a career as an author, and I did.

I think there’s a lot to be said for determination.

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