I did not choose this life — this life chose me.

Stories have been rampaging like demons in my head from as early as I can remember. The only way to purge these demons, I found, was to banish them to the page. But for too many people I meet at book fairs these days, writing is just a hobby, something to help with post-retirement boredom. This is not an assumption on my part. I met a self-published writer who admitted she doesn’t enjoy reading at all. Honestly, you’re in the wrong business if you don’t love the written word as much as you love breathing! Now, don’t get me wrong. If you take pleasure in seeing your name splashed over the cover of some dimestore paperback, more power to you, but I have been pursuing this craft for forty-four years now, which is why I often feel I don’t belong in the indie camp.

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I’ve been hell bent on getting my work into bookstore chains since before I could spell my name. At the age of nine, I dragged my father to DC Comics headquarters in New York City to solicit drafts of my superhero team (basically the Power Rangers before Power Rangers existed), and I queried publishers for my Greek myth fantasy anthology by fourteen. My writing evolved over the decades from the incoherent ramblings of an ADHD-addled kid scratching action scenes onto pink order tickets to novellas hammered into my Brother typewriter. From elementary to graduate school, I was treated like a literary prodigy by professors and classmates alike. In high school, I completed my first ninety-thousand-word novel using a word processor, but I never showed the story to anyone because I knew it was trash. Today, this type of middle school dreck floods Amazon’s database, shaking the faith of would-be readers.

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I remember when being “self-published” was a mark of shame. Now we are drowning in KDP books and AI-written drivel that aren’t worth the pennies they sell for. This isn’t to say you won’t find the occasional gem of a story online (Hell, my indie books sell online), but like any real gem, they are rare and hard to find. I guess I am old-fashioned to believe that a reader’s time is precious, and if you want to earn it, you’ll need to put in the work. Like painting beautifully or playing the violin, writing is a skill that takes years to master.

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My desk is stuffed with dot-matrix-printed pages that nobody, hopefully, will ever lay eyes on. On this shaky foundation, I created The Nomad, my high-school novel that, again, will never see the light of a reader’s lamp, because it’s mostly devoid of nuance, character development, and engaging prose — it's just a lot of fighting, sex, and everything that tickles the mind of a hormone-fueled teenage boy. This led me to my next failure, The Dark Age of Enya, which I completed after meeting my wife and earning my BA English degree from the University of South Florida, and which I am ashamed to have unleashed to the public despite one ardent fan who swears she’d run to save it from her library should her house catch fire. After nine arduous years, I reworked that story into Ages of Aenya, the book that launched my ongoing fantasy series. The Princess of Aenya ensued, receiving critical acclaim from Kirkus Magazine and IndieReader. One reviewer compared it to The Night Circus, now available in a fancy leather-bound edition from The Folio Society. A prequel to my first book, The Feral Girl, has become my best seller, but it may be due to my heroine not wearing anything more than a strap for her arrows. My fans send me artwork, fanfiction, and even custom action figures — one guy even buys copies for friends and family — which leads me to believe I’m doing something right, but who knows? The world is full of quacks.

As of this post, I am fifty years old but have yet to secure a big-name agent or publisher. I figure I’ve got another good twenty years left in me, assuming my cancer doesn’t return, before it’s bye-bye, Nick’s brain. Fate only knows, I may vanish into obscurity before then, like Herman Melville or John Kennedy Toole. But I am not the type to chase bandwagons or crap out vampire, gay romantasy, or yet another Tolkien-clone just because it’s trending. Having quit my day job, overcome depression, and defeated cancer, I continue my lifelong devotion to storytelling because when all is said and done, it’s the story that matters. Great stories inspire us, define us, and make life worth fighting for. And if I can make a reader think, feel, or see the world in a different light . . . then I’ll know I’ve done my job.

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I am currently working on my first YA novel, The Magiq of Aenya, inspired by and written for my two daughters, a book I could never have written without the books that preceded it and a lifetime spent learning to write it. I hope you will join us for the ride.