I guess one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made, as a writer is that I don’t write to a certain niche in the marketplace. I write to entertain. I challenge myself to write in different genres, maybe I’m a failure as a writer and I’ll never sell a million copies, but if I’ve entertained just a few of you then I consider myself a success. For me, I’m not in it for the money. I could write romance, follow the formula and turn out one book a month in that genre putting my heroine in peril who gets saved by my wealth hero and they live happily ever after. I couldn’t waste my time doing that just to earn a quick buck. I get my ideas from a dream I had, a scene I once saw in a movie, or in the case of my book Tetris a disk I got from a friend that had a spreadsheet embedded in it. It starts with that little bit of information and I start asking myself ‘What if?” and from there my mind goes in overdrive and a story emerges.
I’ve found as an avid reader I would get bored reading only a certain genre all the time. It stated out with Victoria Holt’s gothic novels and that was all I read until I actually hated the genre. She was always the most beautiful where circumstances of her life forced her into a governorship and into the arms of the handsome master of the house who came with a lot of baggage. Get my drift? Then there was Patricia Cromwell and her medical examiner heroine. I love crime scene novels, but you can only read so much of that genre before you get cynical and are afraid to leave your house or care about the character anymore. The same for John Grisham and his legal novels, I found myself struggling in the first hundred pages to get into the story. Once I passed that mark it always seemed a journey worth taking, but I can only read so many legal stories, I generally dislike attorney’s and have found very few worthy of a second thought. To really bring home a point, I’ve even read Toni Morrison for a short period, so you can see my reading style is across the board and I would like to think a lot of you are also that way in what you read.
It got so that rather than sticking with a specific market niche of literature I would go to the library, walk down the long aisles, stop and just pick out a book and force myself to read it, even a few westerns which I found very entertaining. I didn’t just stick to fiction. I would go up into the non-fiction section. I’ve read The Elephant in the Room, Too Big to Fail, and The Family. So you can see my reading style is way out of whack, but I don’t think I’m alone.
So clear and simple I don’t write to a specific group, I write for the person who likes a little of everything. I write for the person who picks up a book to escape their mundane life for a few hours. My characters are not rich and famous like Danielle Steele’s. They are about an average person who happens to have something exceptional happen to them and will take you on a journey from cover to cover that will not disappoint you. I once had an editor critique Rustic Road’s telling me that you wouldn’t meet interesting characters such as my main male character in a small rural community. I really took offense because in reality he was putting the common man down. Just because we live in small rural communities doesn’t mean we are all losers.
I write to entertain and at the end of your journey not to be disappointed at the time you spent reading about my characters. I once read a book where the main character was a James Bond type man, got out of every situation throughout the book and then at the end is shot in the back of the head on the second to last page as payback. What kind of author kills off his main character like that? I was so peeved I never picked up another of his books. I read that book over fifteen years ago and I still remember that scene like I read it yesterday.
I’m not into traumatizing my readers like that. I want you to walk away from my stories feeling good about the time you spent reading them.
So in the end I hope you enjoy all the stories I have written because I write them for you, to entertain and enlighten you. In the hopes that you can escape from the world around you if only for a few hours. I also want you to feel good about the time spent with me.
Thank you for taking the time to read my stories.
I’ve found as an avid reader I would get bored reading only a certain genre all the time. It stated out with Victoria Holt’s gothic novels and that was all I read until I actually hated the genre. She was always the most beautiful where circumstances of her life forced her into a governorship and into the arms of the handsome master of the house who came with a lot of baggage. Get my drift? Then there was Patricia Cromwell and her medical examiner heroine. I love crime scene novels, but you can only read so much of that genre before you get cynical and are afraid to leave your house or care about the character anymore. The same for John Grisham and his legal novels, I found myself struggling in the first hundred pages to get into the story. Once I passed that mark it always seemed a journey worth taking, but I can only read so many legal stories, I generally dislike attorney’s and have found very few worthy of a second thought. To really bring home a point, I’ve even read Toni Morrison for a short period, so you can see my reading style is across the board and I would like to think a lot of you are also that way in what you read.
It got so that rather than sticking with a specific market niche of literature I would go to the library, walk down the long aisles, stop and just pick out a book and force myself to read it, even a few westerns which I found very entertaining. I didn’t just stick to fiction. I would go up into the non-fiction section. I’ve read The Elephant in the Room, Too Big to Fail, and The Family. So you can see my reading style is way out of whack, but I don’t think I’m alone.
So clear and simple I don’t write to a specific group, I write for the person who likes a little of everything. I write for the person who picks up a book to escape their mundane life for a few hours. My characters are not rich and famous like Danielle Steele’s. They are about an average person who happens to have something exceptional happen to them and will take you on a journey from cover to cover that will not disappoint you. I once had an editor critique Rustic Road’s telling me that you wouldn’t meet interesting characters such as my main male character in a small rural community. I really took offense because in reality he was putting the common man down. Just because we live in small rural communities doesn’t mean we are all losers.
I write to entertain and at the end of your journey not to be disappointed at the time you spent reading about my characters. I once read a book where the main character was a James Bond type man, got out of every situation throughout the book and then at the end is shot in the back of the head on the second to last page as payback. What kind of author kills off his main character like that? I was so peeved I never picked up another of his books. I read that book over fifteen years ago and I still remember that scene like I read it yesterday.
I’m not into traumatizing my readers like that. I want you to walk away from my stories feeling good about the time you spent reading them.
So in the end I hope you enjoy all the stories I have written because I write them for you, to entertain and enlighten you. In the hopes that you can escape from the world around you if only for a few hours. I also want you to feel good about the time spent with me.
Thank you for taking the time to read my stories.