Decade in Review

It’s the end not only of a year, but also of a decade, so it seems to lend itself to some extra examination. Here’s my end of the decade wrap-up.

It was 2012 when I sat down to write a PhD dissertation and wound up with a novel instead. And through the ensuing years, I’ve published thirty-four books under three different pen names. I’ve had books in Spanish, French, and German; I’ve had paperbacks in Barnes and Noble brick and mortar stores; I’ve had ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks at all retailers; and I hit the USA Today list once. I’ve also been a finalist or a winner of several national awards. I’ve written freelance work, ghostwritten, published non-fiction pieces, and generally done what I could to earn a living as a writer.

It’s good for me to remind myself of all that, because I’ve also had my income decline precipitously from 2016 until today, and my career isn’t at all what I thought it would be at the midpoint of this decade. Publishing is really hard. Technology made it more accessible, but not easier.

In this decade I learned that I’m an ideas person, and in those ten years I’ve pursued a lot of ideas. Ideas in books, ideas in my marketing, ideas online and in real life. If you’ve followed me, it’s probably been a whiplash of crap as I scampered off after one new concept or another. But in the last year and a half I had some hard life-lessons and…