I went to college, majoring in journalism and unofficially minoring in photography. As it turns out, journalism and photography are both in my blood. My grandmother, who passed away when I was eleven, was a gossip columnist for the city paper, which is still operating today! My goal back then was to work there. I even have her old Smith Corona typewriter that she used to type her columns. It is almost a hundred years old, and it's in my office. I feel closer to her having it with me.
My grandfather was a photographer and had his own darkroom. I've seen his pictures.They were a lot like mine, amazingly. I have my own darkroom as well because I love black and white photography so much! Back when I was in school, you could still get black and white film developed for a hefty price. Problem was, they used a standard development process and sometimes the pictures don't look good. By doing everything myself, I can control how my negatives and prints look. My favorite kinds of pictures are self-portraits, black and white infrared, and other experimental processes. I haven't been in my darkroom in a long time due to health issues, but one of my goals for next year is to get back in there. I miss it terribly.
I started self-publishing in 2012 as an experiment. I had been revising one novel over and over again, trying to make it perfect for submission to literary agents. Please note that I had no idea what exactly the "perfect novel" was. I ended up causing myself horrible anxiety every time I opened the file. Some writer friends suggested I take time away from it for some much-needed perspective. It was initially supposed to be six months, but it ended up being ten years. Oops! I started writing a book in 2011 on Halloween that became my debut self-published novel, Fey Touched. I had started it for fun as a rewrite of a novel I'd written for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a yearly writing challenge I always participate in."The Sacrifice" was my first finished novel. After Fey Touched, I went on to write two more books in the series, Grave Touched and Ever Touched. They are published through Turtleduck Press, a small independent press I co-founded. We aim to publish books that don't fit into genre boxes—the different, the experimental, the great books that aren't commercial enough for traditional publishing.
Having a publishing career and two chronic illnesses is challenging. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2003 and trigeminal neuralgia, an excruciating facial nerve pain disease, in 2015. Because of the pain, fatigue, and medication side effects, I can't write as much as I want to, nor can I publish on a consistent schedule. I had to accept that I'll never be a full-time writer. The good news is that I realized that these things don't really matter as long as I keep writing. To date, I've written and published seven books and two poetry chapbooks. Which is not bad for being in the game for nine years!
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Since I can't write full time, I've had to have a day job. I worked in office administration for twenty years—I never did get a job in journalism for health reasons—and in 2017, I was laid off from the job I'd had for sixteen years. It wasn't totally unexpected, but it was devastating nonetheless. I'd starting working there when I was twenty-five and engaged to my ex-husband. When I was laid off, I was forty-one and remarried! Anyway, I'd done some serious soul searching prior to that and decided to try to work from home. My health issues were making it difficult to work a traditional 9-to-5 job, so that made the most sense. I'd been editing books for one of my writer friends, and it occurred to me that editing could be a possibility. I managed to land a few new clients before my layoff, so I was working both jobs for a bit. Anyway, I wasn't making enough money to help support us so I tried to think a bit outside the box. When one of the writers in a group I'm in mentioned needing an assistant, I jumped at the opportunity. And that was my way into the author assistant field—which, ironically enough, didn't really exist when I graduated college. That job led to several others, and now I have my own thriving business. It's a lot of fun. It's also long hours and seven-day workweeks, but I truly don't mind because I am my own boss and I get to choose my hours. All my authors are amazing, wonderful people and I feel so lucky to be able to work with them. I still do freelance editing, and I've added e-commerce consulting to my services, too.
So these days I'm pretty busy. I know I made the right choice for myself. The transition period was tough, not knowing when or if I'd find enough clients to stay afloat, but I always believed that I could make this work if I worked hard enough and was willing to learn new things. It's been almost three years, and I am now making the same amount of money, if not more, than I did at my former job.
What do I do in my free time? Well, I love reading, obviously. ;) I play a MMORPG called Guild Wars, and I also love to learn languages. I was bit by the language-learning bug in middle school with French. I continued to take classes in high school and in college. I am also learning Esperanto and Latin. My next language is going to be German because I am part German. I have a pretty good aptitude for languages, and most of the time I don't confuse anything. Although learning Latin has been a bit more challenging. I'm not really sure why. But it's still fun.
Music is a big thing, too. I used to play the drums in a rock band way back when.;) I play music when I write and when I'm doing things that don't depend heavily on focus. So that means I can't listen to music and edit at the same time. I have a pretty eclectic taste in music because my parents introduced me to many different types of music growing up. My favorite is heavy metal/progressive, but I love symphonic metal, alternative, classic rock, and a bit of pop/dance, too. Mostly Adam Lambert. ;) My favorite band is Queensryche, and several of their songs have inspired whole books or parts of books. A book I am rewriting now wrote itself to their Operation: Mindcrime album. I swear I was in a haze because I do not remember writing entire sections of the book. Operation: Mindcrime also inspired the mind control subplot.
What am I working on now? Let's see...currently I am writing the third book in my Reaper Girl Chronicles series. After that, I'm going to try to finish a supernatural thriller I've been working on for nine years—I love it so much and need to finish it. It only needs about 15,000 more words. ;) And after that, I might try my hand at contemporary romance. Factoid for you: I originally started writing contemporary romance but fell in love with fantasy, and that's what I've written since. I'd like to expand my wings a bit. The book (s) will be a rock star book, wherein I combine music and romance and hope it makes sense.
Anyway, what's your favorite thing to do and why? Have any favorite bands or singers? What challenges you?
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