Confirmed Independent Publisher

I'm a confirmed independent publisher. I knew I was more attracted to making books than fame and fortune before I started, but I lived a justified lie about my writing for years.

In truth, I'm a librarian. Or I was when I started. One of the patrons of the rural bookmobile-as-showpiece I drove for a campaign to create a new service district in the backwoods of my home state brought her writing to me. I blew past the first pages trying to imagine how not to hurt her feelings and I was shocked to see by the third page, she'd created a scene every bit as good as the sort of romantic fiction I respect, but couldn't be forced to read.

That happened in 2008.

Learning the Writing World

By 2010, I'd worked my way across forums and social networks posing as a writer to make contacts and figure out how to get her published. And the guilt set in.

The writing community doesn't ignore anyone. Someone will be positive. Someone will be negative. Someone will ignore. And if you keep writing, you'll probably get stalked a little, too. I still chat with the people I met online that supported me when I was a fraud. In a uncoordinated huddle, they changed the course of my life. I began to organize them so we could write joint publications and form online writing communities. I knew a passion I had only ever felt before while drinking coffee even if I went months without working on own fiction.

My artistic skills never involved language. I've earned significantly more money as a painter than a writer. And as a librarian, I repeated this conversation daily:

Everyone, "So, you must like to read a lot, huh?"

Me, "No, I read nonfiction sometimes. Online. Librarianship requires database management skills more than anything else."

New Zealand and a Reptile in a Business Suit

I published my first novella after moving to New Zealand from Oregon to study my Masters in Information. My confusion about identity, writer or librarian, deepened quickly. I began to add insightful footnotes to my work in progress while quoting humorous popular fiction in an academic context. Professors were not amused.

Thirty thousand words of nonsense cobbled together from Star Trek's Ferengi culture, Ayn Rand and Machiavelli appeared on Amazon before I completed my thesis. On a whim, I'd made a fake book cover for a reptilian personal finance book to amuse my sister and then, for practice, wrote the book to go with it.

That barcode has been viewed MILLIONS of times, because someone liked the idea, borrowed the code and put his own false covers on books in actual bookstores. He went viral. I saw no increase in sales. I had a good idea, but someone else executed it better. At least, he used my ISBN.

Five Years, Four Boyfriends, Six Apartments

Five years, four boyfriends and six apartments on three continents later, I finished my novel and rather than query and I find a small press that wanted it. I released it on Amazon. I earned a 100 USD per month for the first six months, which were most pleasantly, the last six months of my writing career. Then, over the holiday, still intensely pleased with myself, I opened a physical copy to take notes for the second book in the series and discovered every single version I'd created had been a draft complete with typos and an unrevised ending where two critical characters had the wrong background.

I ignored everyone who said that it read like a draft, because I thought they were just being negative. Writers have to be positive. We can't network with the naysayers.

This Is 2016

I love writing. I made a Jurassic Park-style world with extinct Pliocene-like megafauna, because post apocalyptic genetic engineers needed something better to eat. I killed 13 million people with two sentences. I have people obsessed over finding a specific strain of coffee. The entire biblical hierarchy of angels has gotten a knowledgeable if irreverent fantasy world make over worthy of a Final Fantasy game. I wove in some Chippewa mythology to honor my father. And I've just started to realize my great vision to coordinate a choose-your-own story where one man searches for coffee and dies multiple horrible deaths as contributed by other writers and delivered via website.*

No, I know who I am now. I never wanted to just write books or catalog them. I wanted to make the books. Format and feel their spine. Carry them to the post and mail them. And absolutely love it.