A little bit about me as a writer

I officially finished Ella’s story, Helena Gates Lantry Evans’s story, six days ago. It was exactly eight months from when I created the first file for Emancipation, Book One. It doesn’t even suck too badly.

How did I write and publish a trilogy in eight months? It required a lovely confluence of support. Self-publishing has grown up in the last few years, and is arguably a more-viable option than traditional publishing. I had some financial grace come my way. I have an amazing supportive partner who was willing to pinch pennies with me. And, well, every time I don’t have a job for five minutes books start to fall out of me.

The shortest definition I have for right livelihood is doing the thing you would do anyway, whether you get paid for it or not. For a long time psychic and healing work was that thing for me, but even then, whenever I stopped working for a bit I’d write a book about something psychic or healing.

Now it’s books. I love this. It feels like the one thing my life has always been about, through all the confusion and chaos of my employment paths. I’d work at something long enough to master it, and then quit. If it was an interesting enough thing, I’d write a book about it.

When I was a child, I never had an answer to the question about what I wanted to be when I grew up. In college, no answer. Later, well, no answer. The one and only memory I have of a desire for a later career happened when I was about seventeen. I was reading some author bio, perhaps Heinlein when he talks about owning a silver mine and being a cook in the Navy. The thought was, “I want an author bio like that.” The kind with the long, random, almost insane list of jobs. The kind of bio that says “I am a total failure at ‘career,’ but I rock at being an interesting person and collecting life experiences to inform my writing.”

Twenty-five years later, I sat down to write some vampire books, and I realized it was time. It was time for me to put all of me into my work: not a slice of me, writing about one profession or set of skills, but all of me. And it was finally time for me to have that author bio. The one that includes picking raspberries and being a shamanic healer, cleaning motel rooms and managing a software company. The bio that says life and learning have always been the most important things to me.

I’m proud of Ella’s story. It’s grim and dark and painful. It’s funny and full of love, too, at least in parts. I didn’t censor myself or my characters. If they had a horribly painful experience they wanted to share, I let them. If they were a sexual sadist or a victim of sexual abuse or whatever, I wrote that with as much of their truth as I could capture, and as little judgment. I let the whole story come together with as much realistic optimism and success as I could manage. I hope that has been communicated in the work.

Thank you for reading.