'Fool's Illusion' My First Book, 'Bad Apps' My next but Not Last

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. We have an optional question of the month provided to us by the good people who coordinate the IWSG blog hop (See below). But this month's question I'm going to answer and explain in most of today's post. And the question for April is: Do you remember writing your first book? What were your thoughts about a career path on writing? Where are you now and how is it working out for you? If you're at the start of the journey, what are your goals? 

Well, that last part of the question doesn't pertain to me too much and so I’ll just answer the previous two parts. I’ve been writing and publishing at least since the late 2001s, if you count technical and non-fiction writing that I did for various websites. I wrote and self-published my first book going on 10 years ago this coming September. Since then, I've been writing and self-publishing small books, each of which contains one or two short stories. I also worked on a couple of novellas and started a second full-length short story collection in which none of the three followed through for reasons I don’t have time to get into here. (Maybe I’ll discuss them in another post.) For the last two years I've been working on a different full-length book of short stories. 

My First book that I published was a collection of short stories titled "The Fool's Illusion" . I published it in September of 2013 and it was around the start of my paid writing career in journalism. Until "Fool's Illusion", I hadn't published any fiction for payment. So, when I self-published that book, I was proud to have a work of fiction out. Because self-publishing as we know it today was new at that time, I felt like I was set free into the literary world. People could actually see and may buy copies of my fiction work. I didn't have to worry about getting bumped off by a middle man of a publisher or a magazine publication; I had control of whether my work got published and I had my say about how it would be written. Self-publishing really made me think that I was free to make a living from my writing as my own business. 

I made money from both my fiction and non-fiction writing, but I did not make a living from them. I'm still writing and putting it out on the market through self-publishing means, but now I have to balance it out with a day job. I've been balancing it out since 2016 because I basically had learned that freelance writing will not pay the bills in most cases. I'm trying to make a supplemental income from it as a side career but that's not happening. Yet. But it seems like in today's world a writer either makes a living income or no living income at all and that there's no in-between. But that's impossible; there's no such thing as a black and white reality; there's always greys in between. 

No matter what, I'm still writing, and I'm charging for copies of my works for the large part and not selling myself shorter than I have to. (I'm always selling myself short in that my income from freelance writing is not enough to pay for the living expenses.) Because I choose to continue to write no matter how low the income from it is, I've been writing and preparing my second book of short stories, "Bad Apps". Having to work a day job and getting to it on a long public transit commute has mostly held me back in getting "Bad Apps" finished and released. But I've been telling everyone that I'm coming out with this book and so I’m going to continue working on it.

My writing journey hasn't only made me have to work harder and faster (which is still a challenge), but it's also brought me to having created an author's newsletter, "Night Creatures' Call". I talk about my latest fiction projects in each issue of this newsletter. I used to talk about them a lot more here at A Far Out Fantastic Site. But because I'm more pressed for time and like to talk to my audiences more directly, I felt that a newsletter was the route to go to show people exactly where I'm at in a writing project. This way people don't think I'm neglecting the project and just BS-ing them. You can subscribe to "Night Creatures' Call" for free here. 

So, where are you at in your writing career if you've already been writing for a while? If you're new to the writing journey, where do you want to go with it? 

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: Jemima Pett, Nancy Gideon, and Natalie Aguirre! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels! 

Until next time . . .