2024: the year writing became more than a profession

A lot of things didn't kill me. They didn't make me stronger, but they changed who I am.

Wow, it’s been a heck of a year.

It started with a bunch of serious medical issues. The long and the short of it was that my doctor told me if I didn’t make some major lifestyle changes right away, there was a good chance I’d drop dead. And, at the same time, I lost my job and most of my freelance clients. (Thanks, ChatGPT. I’ve been replaced by a robot who makes shit up and writes like a high-schooler.)

Which, of course, made it the perfect time to get married. Outside. In Maine. In March. Amazingly, it was a beautiful, sunny day, and we didn’t freeze to death.

So, after unexpectedly finding myself with a lot of time on my hands, I figured that this would be the perfect time to start writing for myself instead of other people. I gathered together all the short stories I've written over the last couple of years, and self-published them.

I'm no stranger to the world of self-publishing: many years ago, I ran one of the first ebook publishing companies, Hukilau, and I published probably close to 60 books, including both fiction and nonfiction. I did everything: layouts, proofreading, Kindle conversions, cover designs, and submitting them to as many digital publishing outlets as possible. This, however, was the first time I'd ever published my own stuff.

I’ve wanted to be a fiction writer for as long as I can remember. Seeing my book in the Kindle store, the Apple store, and B&N was nice. Seeing a printed copy on my shelf was an even bigger buzz. The best moment of all, however, was seeing a copy in the local library. That was when it all felt real. I’d written a book, and people were reading it.

At that point, things got serious. I followed up Nothing To See Here by publishing a textbook that I originally wrote several years ago when I was teaching at Full Sail, and then a novella that I'd originally written for NaNoWriMo nearly a decade ago. I created a website, a newsletter, and author pages on Facebook, Amazon, and Goodreads. I joined all sorts of writer groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, and I subscribed to a whole bunch of newsletters from other writers.

Then I discovered Substack. I love the way Substack can be used for so many different things: not just blog posts, but also podcasts, emails and more. Slightly to my surprise, I've actually been able to keep up with doing a weekly post here since June!

The moment my first royalty payment arrived was deeply satisfying. It wasn't much, but that wasn't the point. It was the feeling of earning money from writing something that I wanted to write. For the first time, I wasn’t being paid by a client to write what they told me to write.

To celebrate, I blew my entire first three months’ earnings on a ridiculously expensive but rare model of Nosferatu. I'll make him this winter and he'll go on the shelf between Edgar Allan Poe and Bela Lugosi.

Towards the end of the year, I began to focus on a nonfiction project that's been something I've been thinking about for the last four or five years, Unhack Your Brain. It’s all about neuroscience, mental health, and techniques such as meditation, mindfulness, breath work, and the scientific evidence for their efficacy. It’s been very intensive work, and as a result, my fiction writing has taken a bit of a back seat for the last few months.

However, in the background, I'm working on a young adult novel that I started nearly 35 years ago, and a couple of short stories that have been bouncing around my mind ever since I published Nothing To See Here. I'm hoping to get back to those over the winter, when the prospect of going outside is less appealing. As they say, there are two sorts of writers in Maine. There are those who write in the summer and get inspired by the beauty of the world around them. And there are those who write in the winter because there’s nothing else to do and you can’t do anything. I’m definitely the latter.

Realistically, however, those might get pushed into the background again, because I've also become increasingly interested in the prospect of turning my stories into audio and releasing them as a podcast. I've already got readers lined up, and they're just waiting for me to tell them to get started. Then I’ve got to relearn how to do audio editing and how to direct voice actors, and then figure out how to publish podcasts. Jeez, why don’t I just start making them into movies as well?

I guess I'll just see how it goes. It all depends on work, health, the weather, and a bunch of other things that are almost certainly outside my control.

One thing I've definitely learned this year is not to take anything for granted. I finally caught COVID in October, after dodging it for the last few years. It knocked me out for almost a month, which screwed up a lot of my plans for creative projects. More importantly, it meant that I basically missed the whole of fall this year which deeply upset me, as that's the best thing about living in Maine. I had to make do with collecting what I could from nearby and bringing fall colors into the house.

In fact, it's probably fair to say that absolutely nothing this year has gone to plan. But you know what? I'm fine with that. Despite everything the world has thrown at me, I'm still standing, and I've achieved a bunch of things I've wanted to do for decades. More importantly, I now think of myself as a proper writer. I've written professionally for the best part of 40 years, but I no longer think of myself as just a corporate hack.

This year, I became an author, and I'm damn proud of that.