Birthday Blog

Today is my 54th birthday.

As I look back, I’m plagued with the existential question of whether I’d change anything about my life if I could. I’m thinking mainly about the books I’ve written because, well, this is my Writing Blog. I’ve recently published my 20th novel and am finding it frustrating that I can’t seem to generate enough income from those 20 novels to allow me to buy the little extra things that I’d like to get for myself. According to the 2025 Indie Author Survey, 77% of surveyed authors claim to be self-published, but of those, 44% make less than $100 per month from the sales of their books. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live on less than $100 per month.

I write as a hobby. Up until the time when I was able to stop working and stay home full-time, I didn’t earn my living as a writer. I was an accountant. I went to school not to be a writer, learning about plotlines, character development, world-building, and how not to info-dump details to bore the reader, but to learn about debits, credits, temporary permanent assets, and double-declining depreciation methods. I spent 30 years of my work life balancing the books of companies to pay the bills, using the left side of my brain, and writing what I think of as great books to keep my sanity, putting the right side of my brain to work. It’s a good thing I can successfully juggle both sides of ye olde noodle equally well. I just can’t juggle in reality. I’ve tried, and I fail every time.

I wrote my first story while in elementary school. I’ve always loved stories. So why, then didn’t I pursue a career as a writer? Well, it mainly has to do with my mother’s insistence that I pursue a “reliable” career, earning enough to support myself and not have to rely on my husband to survive. My mom and dad had a turbulent marriage, which led to a mostly dysfunctional childhood for me. But I digress and have veered off topic.

Being a gullible and mostly naïve person, I heeded my mother’s insistent demand and followed a stable and reliable career in accounting. But I didn’t abandon my love of writing. I just did it as a hobby in my free time. I’ve written several blog posts about how I got started in self-publishing, so I’ll let you go back and read those if you’re interested. But again, I’ve veered off the topic of this blog post, which is: Would I go back and change the decision not to pursue writing as a career?

The quick answer is no.

​But anyone who knows me, knows that I’m not a quick-answer kind of gal. I like to spell out in detail why something is or isn’t. I’m the kind of person who, when you ask for the time, will tell you how the clock was made, who made it, what the clockmaker looks like, the clockmaker’s entire backstory, and anything I know about his or her love interests and any drama that’s going in the person’s life at any given time. Unfortunately, I may or may not remember to actually tell you the time. So with that being said, let me explain why I wouldn’t go back and become a writer instead of an accountant if the opportunity presented itself.

Back when I wrote my first official novel some 20 years ago now, indie publishing wasn’t as commonplace as it is today. If you wanted to seriously make writing your career, you had to go through a publisher, and that meant giving up control of your writing, not to mention, in most cases, losing the rights to your books and characters. That’s just how publishing houses worked back then. Most indie publishers were simply vanity-press institutions that would gladly take your money and provide you a physical book that you could put on your bookshelf, simply to say that you were a published author. But they didn’t do the things that would make the book sell, such as marketing.

I never wanted to give up control over my characters. I’m not what you’d call a control freak. I just wanted to retain control over something that I’d created. My characters were created by my own brain. They’re my children, and just as my husband and I decided at the beginning of our marriage not to have a child until one of us could stay home and raise him or her, never wanting the raising of our child to be done by strangers in a nursery or daycare, I wanted to keep my characters so I could evolve them how I wanted rather than how the publisher wanted.

Writing over the years, for me, has been therapeutic. It has allowed me to put my thoughts on the world into a format that makes sense to me. My home office has always been my happy place, my little magical bubble of beauty in a world that was slowly becoming a muddy quagmire of misery. A bit dramatic? Maybe, but I’m a fiction writer. Drama is kind of what we do. I’ve enjoyed being able to put my thoughts, hopes, fears, and beliefs out there in the guise of my writing. It helps me make sense of the chaos. It allows me to exert some illusion of control in a world where I have none. In my stories, I can exert control over the outcome of how the story ends. 

Speaking of the ending … if I may take a slight detour off topic … again. A book’s ending is one of the most important parts of the story. It seems odd to say that how the story ends is more important than how it begins, but I think it’s true. The beginning is important. Don’t get me wrong. If the start of the book stinks, the reader won’t peruse more than the first few pages. And the goal of the author is to keep the reader turning the pages — to get the reader to ask, “And then what happens?”

But the ending is what stays in the reader’s mind after the book is put back on the shelf, or returned to the library, or given back to whoever it was borrowed from. The ending is what will make the reader come back and either read the book again or read another book that you write … or decide that in order to get a decent ending you have to write the darned book yourself. Fun fact: That was the driving force to make me decide to finally write and publish my first novel. I read a book that I really liked, but it had a crappy ending. I mean, a smack-your-forehead stupid ending. It actually ruined my opinion of the story. And it wasn’t just one or two books I’d read that had bad endings. It was dozens of books that simply ended in a way that I disapproved of. So I thought to myself that if I wanted a good story that had a great ending, I’d have to do it myself. And so I did.

Okay. Enough of taking the scenic, winding road. It’s time to get back on track. Back to the purpose of the blog … what was the purpose again? Oh, yes! Why I wouldn’t go back and become a professional writer.

Aside from needing to go through a publisher to make any serious money from the sale of the book, I think I’d keep writing as a hobby just for the fact that I think turning writing into a career would diminish my enjoyment of the process. I love writing. I love to tell stories. But I love to tell those stories on my terms. 

​“Love is at the center of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love and things that you love should be the things that you do. So, that’s what you learn from books.”  --Ray Bradbury (from NEA Big Read: Meet Ray Bradbury, October 2017)

Writing has always come easy to me. It’s never been something I needed to “work at.” If I have a clear idea in my mind, I can easily sit and write 10,000 words before my fingers cramp and my stomach demands that I get up from the chair and put something edible inside it besides coffee. I have, in a span of a month, written in excess of 50,000 words, as was the goal of the now defunct NaNoWriMo that I’d participated in for fifteen years. (See my blog post on that topic.) But no novel of mine has ever been as “small” as 50,000 words. I have completed the first rough draft of one of my typical novels in the span of two months. That’s, of course, not including the editing and rewriting that follows. What follows the writing of the novel is the real work, in my opinion. The editing, formatting, layout, cover design, publication, and marketing. That’s the part that I have a love/hate relationship with and leads me to the thought that I might not enjoy “working” as a writer instead of writing as a hobby.

Knowing that if I don’t sell X-number of books a month means I can’t pay my rent or buy groceries adds pressure to the process that I’m not sure I’d enjoy. I’m not an adrenaline junkie who thrives on the thrill of life or death. I didn’t procrastinate in school, so I wouldn’t be up for all hours of the night before a term paper was due. I don’t wait until the eleventh hour to complete something. I’m a rather uninteresting person who likes simple pleasures. Sure, if I wrote my first novel and it sold big enough that I could sustain myself financially while I wrote my second book, maybe my thoughts would be different. But the truth is, most indie authors don’t succeed like that. 

Aside from being uninteresting, I consider myself to be a practical person. I tend to not take unnecessary risks. Maybe it was the repeated warnings my mother beat into me (figuratively, not literally) about being able to support myself, or it’s just my survival instinct of wanting to make sure I had money for coffee (and for rent, utilities, and gas) that made me seek out other “secure” employment. I’m not sure.

Another reason I wouldn’t go back and change my life path and choose writing as a career is that I’m not comfortable promoting myself. I see authors in bookstores doing book signings or going on social media and blowing up various groups and boards screaming out how their book is better than the 8 billion other books that are flooding the market annually. I’m an introverted person. Being outside of my house is a challenge some days. I’m not agoraphobic, but I like the comfort of being at home. Unfortunately, sitting at home in my aforementioned magical bubble office doesn’t get books sold and bring money into the bank account. As with most things, to be a successful author, you need to work at it. Really work at it. You need to be willing to promote yourself, loudly in some cases, and I’m not sure I have the personality to do that. Sure, you grow as an author by stepping outside your comfort zone, and marketing is just a part of being an author, but I’m not certain I’d handle public situations very well.

The truth is, I like who I am today, and every choice I've made in the past 54 years has made me the person that I like. Maybe in some alternative universe I did choose to become a writer. Boy, wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to glimpse into those other realities and see how the outcome of a decision would play out? It would be like having a real-world personal 8-Ball where you could see what would happen with each of the possible choices you could make. That would make an interesting book.

That reminds me of a dream I had a while ago. Now, if you’ve ever looked around on my website, Dreamwriter.earth, you know that I often get inspiration for my books from my dreams. I had a dream a while ago about an unnamed woman who (for some reason yet to be determined) suddenly has the ability to be aware in both reality and the dream world. She goes through a typical day and goes to bed, only to wake up in the dream world, where many things are different. I had the scene in my dream of her having lunch with someone, who in either reality or the dream world is a friend, but in the other world is someone she just meets. She begins to question her sanity when things in one world contradict events in the other. It would have to be a first-person account of her trying to understand what the heck was going on and figure out how to stop it, if she even can. I imagine some form of male protagonist finding her, one who’s in the same situation as she is and has been for a while, as well as some form of sentinel or guard who prevents people from retaining consciousness in both places. The idea needs work, but it has potential. Of course, the last thing I need is more people checking into The Noodle Motel (see my blog post about that).

Anyway, as promised, I’m not someone who simply tells you the time when asked. By thinking through the premise of this blog post, I might have solved my existential crisis, so I can enjoy my birthday without pondering the fate of how many alternative realities I might or might not create while figuring out the answers to my own questions. 

Now, the only question I’m left with is whether to allow these new unknown characters into my brain and ponder the details of writing the book, or to spend the next two months (my own PerNoWriMo – see blog post) writing some characters who’ve already checked in and are patiently, or impatiently in some cases, waiting their turn. I really need that personal 8-Ball to see if either of these will be big sellers. Without that, though, I’ll just have to rely on the same thing that has helped me decide what to do for the past 54 years: ye olde noodle