Authors, Kai Strand & LA Dragoni

Live simply   Love thoroughly   Model integrity   Embrace reality   Celebrate creativity   Encourage unity   Accept diversity   Reject bigotry   Display decency   Exemplify ardency   Demonstrate vivacity   Epitomize humanity   Appreciate advocacy   We've had a fun run with # InkRipples . Especially this year as others added their ripples in the inkwell. I especially want to thank Katie Carroll and Mary Waibel for the years of fun and inspiration. But that first goal on my list...yeah, it means I'm bowing out. I'm going to change the focus of my blog and my writing career in 2018 and I'm going to live more simply. This blog will be more about my life and how it plays out around me. For the first time since I started blogging (a million years ago) you'll get to know the man behind the curtain and what makes her tick. At least a little. I have a platform – albeit...

It’s like we realized November is National Novel Writing Month when we chose this month’s topic. Huh. To me this is an extension of last month’s topic of Career vs Hobby. One of the most difficult aspects of being an author – of it being a career vs it being your hobby – is that you finish the dang book. How many people have partial books on their hard drive? A LOT. Even career authors have partial books; a.k.a. works in progress, or WIPs. But a career author makes a habit of finishing them. There is an abandon point in every book. For me it is usually somewhere in the middle. Usually near the end of the middle. Middles are really hard. In my mind, they feel like I’m trudging waist deep through a thick bog. Peat is gathering around my legs and hips making the progress more and more difficult and finally I have to think, This book so being so difficult. Is this worth it? That’s where you either abandon the book because you can’t see a way to the end, and you stay a hobbyist....

When does writing move from a hobby to a career? First and most simply we could just let the IRS answer this for us. They consider it a hobby if you haven’t made a profit after five years (or something like that, I’m not a tax man.) But for now, we’re going to ignore the government’s definition and concentrate on what the author and her readers want. The author’s goals are probably the biggest definer of this. Many authors are happy to write and publish just for their friends and family. They don’t care if their book(s) ever makes money or is held by the hands of a stranger. The rest of us want all the strangers to pick up our book(s) and read. We want fan mail telling us how our book changed their lives or helped them heal or some other life affirming thing. We want fans asking when the next book comes out. We want fans posting drawings of our characters on Deviant Art. Writing fanfiction on Watt Pad. Using our character as their user name. I’m nowhere near that level ...