MILESTONE REACHED

Goodness Gracious Sakes Alive!

 

I just counted up the number of books I’ve written and published: 15!!! (not counting the first edition of DeForest Kelley: A Harvest of Memories, the first iteration of DeForest Kelley Up Close and Personal).

 

15 titles is a MAJOR MILESTONE in a writer’s life!

 

Plus thousands (and I do mean, literally, thousands) of pieces I’ve written for clients across the globe and under my own name in the past 12 years…

 

I am a Writer, with a capital “W”, I am!

 

Back when I was a kid, I caught the writing bug. All I dreamed of, ever, was becoming  a writer or an actor… but I had many more opportunities to practice writing than I did acting, and as I got older, I realized I wasn’t cut out to be an actor.

 

Being an actor involves too much spotlight. If you get good at it, you can never be anonymous again, and I like my anonymity. I’d hate to have to be worried about going out in public and running into truly crazy fans. (Not the usual ones; the insane ones who set out to hurt, possess, or stalk you.)

 

Writing is show business for shy people. I don’t need to be worried about going anywhere except a Star Trek convention (and nowadays, even that probably wouldn’t elicit much notice!)

 

From third grade on, I was a writing fool. I’d take Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on adventures that his real writers never even dreamed of. I did the same with Stoney Burke, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy in junior high and high school.

 

Writing is more fun than just about anything else I can imagine.

 

I visited Chris Bailey, another accomplished writer (he writes fabulous fiction), to celebrate his birthday this weekend and we got to talking about authors who think of writing as near-torture. Apparently his brother (also a good writer) is one of those people.

 

Neither Chris nor I can understand it.

 

I sure wouldn’t have continued writing if I’d ever considered it torture.

 

To me, writing frees me to share what’s going on inside. I shared my creative spark. And if I was angst-ing, I shared it, too–in my journals at first and publicly later as I realized that sharing it wouldn’t kill me or send people screaming off in the opposite direction; in fact, doing so helped me locate and embrace people who were feeling pretty much the same way I do about things.

 

I always imagined myself as a writer with lots of books to my credit. But to count them up, and consider  the uncounted additional things I’ve written that didn’t become books (including my journals: I have literally hundreds of them) truly blows me away!

 

I’ve helped entrepreneurs and business owners make millions of dollars with my writing skills!

 

At Upwork alone (a slog if there ever was one when it comes to finding clients willing to pay professional writers what we’re truly worth–it’s all about ROI, baby!), I’ve earned probably a quarter million dollars by now since I first hung my shingle there. A quarter of a million dollars isn’t a lot over eleven years, but the mere thought of earning that much, as a  kid living in the sticks, wasn’t even on my radar!

 

Upwork stopped adding up my earnings after I made $100,000, and that was six or seven years ago, so I’m extrapolating to reach the total I just gave, but it’s probably pretty close, especially since I’ve raised my rates by a factor of 4 since I hung my shingle there in 2008… I’m probably guessing on the conservative side.

 

But it isn’t the amount of money I’ve made that makes me proud. It’s the five-star rating I’ve maintained throughout my tenure there. I’m a Top-Rated provider. I’ve always been a Preferred Provider (back when Upwork was Elance).

 

My clients are deliriously happy. That makes me deliriously happy. It means the stuff I wrote for them will linger in cyberspace long after I’m shoveled off this mortal coil, continuing to help them succeed.

 

And since I never married and have no kids, my books (and maybe my journals, God forbid!) are all that future generations will ever know of/about me. They will be my legacy.

 

I look at the titles and think, “Am I finished now? What have I left unsaid, unwritten, that I still need to get down on paper?”

 

Sometimes I think I’m finished, and I get depressed.

 

But then, literally overnight, a new idea for a book will pop into my head (as it did it with Yay-Sayers: The Good Guides and Become Shamelessly, Fearlessly YOU: How to Stop Hiding in Plain Sight) and I’m off and running again, trying to keep up with what’s flooding into my brain!

 

I was born to write. I live to write, I don’t write to live.

 

It is my greatest joy.

 

Sharing it with the world is my second-greatest joy.

 

Finding, communicating with and being embraced by kindred spirits is a life-long quest. Writing helps me do that without feeling overwhelmed with performance anxiety.