Blood from Stone: Finding Joy When Writing Becomes Work

I was sitting around with some folks at my day job, waiting for another colleague to arrive for a meeting, when someone asked me how my vacation had been. “Oh, the usual,” I said. “I had book deadlines.”

This turned into a discussion about the trials of publishing, book covers, and author control over payments and marketing. After talking about how you only get paid twice a year, at best, and payments are usually late or – in the case of really awful publishers - never show up, one of my colle...