12 years full time

This month marks 12 years since I left my IT job in Edinburgh, took off the suit and tie and made the leap into the unknown to write full time here on the coast in Newfoundland.

There have been ups and downs since then but we haven't starved, I've had over 80 pro short story sales and a bunch of books do well with several different publishers, particularly the ebooks.

And now I'm officially a pensioner, with money coming in from the old job's pension to provide a comfort mattress in lean writing times.

I'm bloody glad I made that leap.

Thanks, all of you.

A couple of people have asked how I did it. I wrote. I wrote a lot... 28 novels, 16 novellas and over 150 short stories in those 12 years. Getting them all into print, ebook (and 15 of them into audiobook) means I have a lot of sources of micro-income, especially these days with the e-books.

I was also lucky in hitting the Amazon kindle charts early on when sales were soaring and had a couple of pretty big hits, reaching the top 3 in the horror and sci-fi charts on a couple of occasions, those books going on to continue to sell on a regular basis.

More recently, in the past year, I've discovered the delights of writing an action adventure, creature feature series that seems to have hooked me a whole load of new readers and that series now accounts for about half my income.

I'm in my sixties now. I always thought i'd slow down about this point, coming up to 30 years of writing, but the ideas keep coming, so I'll keep writing them as long as the brain cells hold out.