This question is one that, just in its nature, seems somewhat layered. Just sort of meta-analyzing the question and what I know about people makes me want to criticize the asking itself. Because in a way, it’s almost like a form of gatekeeping. What gives me any sort of authority to judge when other people get to call themselves what they want?
​
Because that’s kind of the thing. People can call themselves whatever they want, and it doesn’t have to affect others. It’s really a matter of the individual’s relationship with themself and… how they handle the truth or falseness of their claim within their own heart. 

Because there’s really no way to quantify it. It’s not like a Doctorate, where if you don’t have one, you’re legitimately not a doctor. 

But if you’ve written one word, ever… you are a writer. You engage in writing in some form. 
I guess, if I’m going to be so avoiding of just taking the question as it is, I do need to address the opposite thought to the simple “you can call yourself whatever you want” claim.

Stolen valor. 

Those situations where people will claim military experience or awards when they have never served, or claim medical expertise when their education is very literally having watched two Youtube videos that support their own opinions. That’s what I’m talking about. Where does one draw the line with creative endeavors? If you published a book twenty years ago but haven’t written a word since, are you still a writer?

I think so.

So… I think a lot of this really boils down to “what is a writer?”

Is it someone who has published a book? Sorry journalists, bloggers, and fanfic creators, you’re not really writers. Someone who writes regularly? Well, that novelist who was once prolific but now is not can no longer claim being a writer, even though they used to be able to. Is it someone who has tons of readers? Oh, the fanfic writer, blogger, and journalist now are writers… so it depends on audience then? 

But then… what about the person who writes long journal entries but only for themself? What about the woman who has self-published twenty romance novels and hasn’t sold a single copy?
Why are we so determined to police creativity?

I’ve been a writer for a very long time. I have had long stretches of productivity and long ones of zero production. I have things no one but me has read, and I’ve had fans seek me out at conventions asking what my next project is. I’ve written things just for me that will never see the light of day.

Some things are quantifiable, like having a doctorate or military service record. 

The arts… are so different. And humans are so varied and exciting that it really isn’t fair to try and ask when someone is “allowed to” call themselves an artist. 

Because even people who write horrible stories are still writers. People who draw stick figures are artists.

If you want to call yourself a writer, do it the moment you want to. I’m not the boss of you. It’s not my call to make.

I just hope that however you do it, you enjoy it. If you only tell stories to yourself in your head, you’re still a writer. If you’ve got a dozen bestsellers, you’re a writer.

Make it your own, however that looks. It’s not one-size-fits-all. 

When should you call yourself a writer? Whenever you’re ready to.

Well, you guys should know me by now. I like to sort of answer things a bit tangentially if I don’t necessarily feel like the original questions is that good.

“Inspired you most” is so darn selective, and… frankly, I almost find it trivializing. There are so many books out there, and maybe if I was younger with a lot fewer books under my belt (reading and writing) I could narrow things down to a “most” inspiring book. As it is… that would be making something small of what’s really a large question.

There’s no comparison between books that have inspired me, mostly because… well… I take inspiration from tons of small places. Tons of them. A conversation, an observation, an experience, a musing, a passing comment… all of those are sources for inspiration.

So I suppose… I’m going to tackle this in a sort of “name your biggest, longest-lasting inspirations” or something like that. Because… yeah, my inspiration sources are constantly changing.

I decided to write a post about the specific inspirations for my published projects, so that was last week's post. But for this post… let me talk about one of the books that has truly inspired me to be better… by showing me what I do NOT want to be.

Immortaland: The Greatest Fantasy Kingdom to Exist and That Will Ever Exist

So, this is hands down the worst book I’ve ever read, and it’s basically a guidebook on how not to draw people into your fantasy world. I really don’t want to encourage anyone to read it, nor do I want to spend too much more of my life thinking about it, but let’s just say I read it in 2017 and I still remember nothing more than it being totally awful. Let me just paste the review I did of it as a precautionary tale.

“I seriously only read the entirety of this book so that I could write a review with a clear conscience. I can honestly say I have never been so happy to leave a fantasy world than I was to leave Immortaland behind.

Let's start with the claim that it's "The Greatest Fantasy Kingdom To Exist And That Will Ever Exist." Is that not ridiculously presumptuous? Right from the start, the writer is setting the bar ridiculously high. It's claiming that this place is better than Randland, Temerant, Middle Earth, Earthsea, and countless other worlds that are rich and full of adventure, culture, and intrigue. With these high expectations in mind, let's begin to read.

Start out with second-person POV. Oh, so I'm the hero here? Okay. Let's see what kind of adventures I get into.

100% done with the book... none. No adventure. No conflict. Hardly any culture. Zip. I'm not exaggerating. There was nothing here. The entire book is just... description. Not even infodump. It's like someone saw the opening scene of a movie, touring a castle, and tried to transcribe it into text. It doesn't work in the slightest.

So let's try to take it in terms of something like a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. Maybe we can use it as source material to play with. Nope. Doesn't work there, either. This "world" is nothing but a storeroom of overpowered artifacts and ejaculations from a clicheed imagination. I can't tell you how tired I got of everything "bestowing ultimate [INSERT TRAIT HERE]." The whole time, the character named You was basking in more and more ultimate power. Soaking it in, basking in it, and so on. It was like watching a sequence from Dragon Ball Z where all they do is glow yellow... ad nauseum. Imagine a game where all you do is go around and collect buffs. What do you even use them for? Nothing. There's nothing to purpose there. What's worse, there wasn't even any real connection between the buffs. One throne that You sat in pushed away all negative emotions and cares. But a few scenic places later, You asked a question that's been bothering You, and it was answered. Were the negative questions and annoyances cast aside or not? Even as a resource, there's nothing of serious value here.

So let's take it as what it really is: drivel. I hate sounding cruel, but this was nothing but personal stimulation. It's an exercise in creation. That's fine. I don't understand how this can be considered anything more than a poorly painted word-landscape. It was wanting an editor, something to actually give it some sense of value for itself.

I will say that there is the potential for many stories here. Sadly, this book told exactly ZERO of them.”

In short, do NOT read this book. Save yourselves. You’re already better than this guy as long as you’re not trying to pass unsatisfying softcore self-insert mental masturbation off as a fantasy setting of value.

“Where do you get your ideas from?” is a pretty common question, so I thought I’d go back and reminisce a bit about what made each of my published works happen in the first place. Those first sparks, if you will.

I’m even going to go into how they strayed from the original ideas on some of them, because… why not?

Empeddigo - Man, this is digging back in the old days. I remember having two main basic ideas when I was developing this story: a fantasy/science fiction genre mashup, and an infectious disease. I definitely didn’t pull things off as well as I’d hoped, but to be totally honest… I haven’t read the book in a decade and a half. I remember very few of the details. I could probably only name three characters from it.

The Trials of Hallac - This is my epic poem, and a lot of my inspiration came from the format of other epic poems. Naturally, one of the main influences was The Odyssey. I’ve been a fan of Greek mythology since I was ten years old or so, and I took Latin in high school, so even the Romanized side of things was on my radar for a long time. Mostly the narrative technique of in media res affected me here, as well as the idea of there being certain specific, self-contained segments. The syllable-count system affecting the format was somewhat inspired by basic numeroulogy, but more from numerical symbolism across some faith systems. Like 3 and 7 being “lucky” or “holy” numbers, and therefore being the syllable counts spoken by deities, for example.

Plot-wise, it was strongly inspired by generalized fantasy gaming. The monsters and incidents were pretty basic in that regard. The main character’s familial conflicts were ripped pretty much straight out of Final Fantasy Tactics, with the main character being the third son and the only one born to a non-noble mother and therefore seen as less than his brothers.

Mere Acquaintances - So this story was really a project on writing vs editing and sticking to your guns. The nature of the project was to release it serially, much in the way authors like Charles Dickens published some of his works bit-by-bit in the newspaper. Mere Acquaintances was supposed to be something I never got to edit, a literal first draft novel put out as a sort of “don’t compare your first draft to someone’s finished product” kind of thing. There is a ton wrong with this project, and like Empeddigo, I doubt I could tell you much about it now other than what I remember. I haven’t read it in ages.

Starsigns - Now we’re getting into the books I definitely remember better. Starsigns went through a lot of changes from its first inception. The initial idea was “the boy who could speak fairy” and that whole idea came from my local renaissance faire. I’ve been going every year since 1999 (except for 2020 and 2021 - thanks Covid) so I’m super familiar with it. Well, we have an awesome gaggle of fairies who work the faire, and they have a certain high-pitched, somewhat bubble-throaty way of speaking. Think something like Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, but more garbled. Anyway, it’s a voice I can easily do, so I’ve been “speaking fluent fairy” for ages and seeing people who can’t do it or who barely understand the fairies themselves gave me the idea of there being only one person known who can understand them.

Add in inspiration from Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings and even more from her Soldier Son Trilogy and… yeah, that was the basis for the book.

Like I said, it went through a lot of changes. The main character’s name was originally Kerr and he was one of like 7 or 8 siblings, mostly boys. He was the only one without a prescribed fate and was therefore considered sort of… extra. To the point the working title for the book for a very long time was “The Extra Son.” Well, Kerr turned to Cair, and his many siblings got pared down/combined into a set of boy-girl twins. The book was planned to span a few years, from Kerr’s early teens to his early twenties maybe. Cair’s story spans a few weeks at most. There’s no pirate storyline like I originally had planned. Hell, in the original plots, there was no Almo, and… I don’t think there was a Tivory, even. 

In all honestly, I think Starsigns came out better than The Extra Son would have as originally planned, and I say that while still having some dissatisfaction over how Starsigns turned out!

Criminal From Birth - Ahh, Criminal. We’ve definitely come into the zone of books I remember more of. Well, we started that with Starsigns, but even that’s already 8 years old in publication, and a good 10 years since its first inception. The idea came from a similar place as Empeddigo, actually. I wanted to do a sort of genre mash-up I hadn’t seen before, and it turned out to be fantasy courtroom drama. That’s because I’ve been a fan of the movie Basic for a long time and the form intrigued me. For those who haven’t seen or heard of it, it’s a story about an incident in military training in Cuba where a few soldiers ended up dying, and they bring in a disgraced former investigative agent to sort out what happened. The story gets rehashed multiple times, with the details being questioned and investigated until something unties part of the mystery and the real answers finally come out. If you’ve seen Hero or Roshomon, it’s that same sort of thing.
I didn’t pull it off nearly as well as I liked, but… that’s how we learn. The story I came up with involved investigating bits and pieces of one man’s life, all to determine whether the crimes he committed were things he could truly be blamed for or if he was doomed to commit them with no choice because of his own nature.

The hard part is that the book has turned out to be the first of a trilogy, and neither of its sequels are going to be a bit like it in that sort of setting or tone.

The Deadly Studies - This is probably one of the least-inspired-by projects I did, mostly because it’s a spinoff series. So I had to take most of the inspiration from the original source material, John G. Walker’s The Statford Chronicle. Since I was working in that world, with certain plot points, timelines, and character info to line up to, I had less freedom to do much. I don’t know that I can really pinpoint any sort of inspiring stories or sources for its format or anything, which strikes me as sort of odd for me. This is probably the closest I have to a general amalgamation of all the potential inspirations I’d taken up to that point in my life. I never really thought about that before. Weird.

I knew July was going to be nuts, but… it’s gonna have nothing on September. We had two big travel cons, but in September, we’ll have three. Back to back weekends, too.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. It’s been rough. Still mulling over the title.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Well, I had like two weeks that I couldn’t make any time to work on this. Time slips way too easily. It’s on my mind, I just need to talk myself into stealing minutes where and when I can. It’ll happen.

I did get some writing done, but not as much as I wanted. The rewrite of chapter two is done, and I started on chapter three! Chapter two is at 1416 and the chapter three first draft so far is at 422, so 1838 on it for July. 

Collaboration Project - We’re doing planning and prep, figuring out our starting point.

MODERN ERA (2024-present)

A lot of what’s been happening in this modern age is put out in bits and pieces in these blog posts. I got hit with the old IDEA in 2024 and started picking at a novel. Got a good ways into the outline, too before I ran into an old trap of my own. Luckily, I had no plan to give into the sunken cost fallacy and push at it. Eventually, I did give it up, but I’ve talked about that on my monthly updates, and you can find them all in a collection here on Patreon or on my website feed.

Something was wrong outside writing, though. I didn’t realize at the time, but I was in a depressive episode that had been surrounding me for over a year by the time 2025 rolled around. I’ve lived with depression since the early 2000s (with 2005 or so being my worst episode) so I was no stranger to it. But this was a different source, one I’d never encountered before.

The company gave us an extra week of holiday paid time off at the end of the year, so we all got a half-day Christmas Eve and then didn’t return to work until the first business day after New Year’s. Some years, due to the way the days of the week fell, we could have like 2 weeks thanks to weekends and junk. I clocked out on Dec 24, 2024 (I believe, might have been the 23) and turned off my computer, planning to enjoy my holidays. Which I did.

Turning my work computer back on Jan 2 2025 was one of the worst moments of my current experience. That was the moment I realized that not only had I been depressed, I but I hadn’t been all during the holidays. 

Thing is… I probably wouldn’t have done much about it but soldier on, if not for my manager at that job. See, at this point, I’d been nearly 5 years in the same position at work. The job had evolved, tasks changing, responsibilities growing and morphing, but it was the same job title, barely any significant pay changes other than “cost of living” which are really “half inflation rate increase” raises. I got bonuses and one hefty raise over those 5 years because I griped when the ENTIRE REST OF THE TEAM got title promotions and raises except for me, but… I’d never been in a single job that long. The bank for 3 years came closest. 7 years at the call center had had me in 3 different departments, all VASTLY different.

I was burned out on the actual job. Problem was, I’d been casually job hunting since 2023 with not even a single hit.

So on Jan 3, I believe, my manager Kenny pulled me in for a one-on-one just to reconnect after the holidays, to gear up for the new year. I confessed being burned out, and he asked me a serious question:

When’s the last time you took a vacation?

I was stunned. Working from home basically was a vacation for me. I’d gotten my job down to needing only about 2 hours of actual work most days. Less on some, more on some others. I was making nearly $60k a year doing surprisingly little. I was good at most of my job, but the things I wasn’t good at or didn’t like seemed to be the direction my tasks were heading. It was going to get worse. But working from home made me not really consider work as work. I was doing stuff at home. I’d play video games, do chores, cook, or whatever between meetings and tasks. A lot of my day was entertaining myself until the clock ran out. I used my sick time for mental health days, but my personal and vacation time were usually for conventions I did with my best friend or the occasional family vacation with them and their kids. I almost always carried over a few days or even a week of vacation time at the end of each year.

I never used that time for myself. Just for myself. One mental health day if I needed it, then back to the grind.

So from Jan 6-10, I used 5 precious vacation days to give myself an actual staycation at home. Well, I had the weekend before and after included in that. 

Instant depression relief, knowing I didn’t have to log onto that damn computer the following Monday. On Jan 5, I had pretty much already decided that when I returned to work, I was going to put in my 2 week notice. I enjoyed the whole week of vacation knowing that. 
I waited a little bit to do it, honestly, but I did by the end of January.

And oh, did I phone it in those last few weeks. I handed over my tasks to different members of the team, made guides and instructions, but like hell was I handing over the things I’d automated or any of my serious tips and tricks. 

My last day there was Feb 14 2025. I started this Patreon not long after that, on March 10. Frankly, the rest is history.

As for my writing habits now… I’m struggling to make them real habits. It’s been improving, but only a little at a time. I’ve managed to make Mondays in general my serious writing day. I’m writing this on a Monday, in fact (June 15 2026). I get my social media posts about the week’s patron and free posts out, set up my posts for the next week (sometimes that involves writing a free post on the fly), and usually try to write another blog post if I can, just to try and prevent those on the fly ones. Any time and capacity for words I have left, I put toward fiction, be it a short, an exercise, or my current writing project. 

I’m trying to get back to a point where if I have some free time, I’m at the computer writing. That’s my next habit to rebuild. It’s… not there yet. Maybe by the end of summer.

I’ve spent a long time writing this post… to the point I’m probably going to split it into a few posts to stretch it and make my effort worth the time to release, like I did with my outlining series of posts.

But right now, it’s just after 2pm, I’ve been working on the Patreon setup and all this for about 2 hours. I need to go have lunch, come back, and get to Subscription Life. 

I’ll see you on the other side.

BURNOUT (2020-2024)

The mid 2018-late 2019 period is pretty dim. I was only unemployed for a month, during which I started streaming on Twitch. I got a temp job that quickly moved to full time, and by February 2019, I was in a great position that I saw myself in for a long while (spoiler alert; I was, until I wasn’t.) It was in music publishing administration, again an offline position, clerical. A small team, lots of data processing and management, and I gradually moved from more processing to more management over the course of my time there.

I kept chainmailing and writing, trying to get The Deadly Studies completed. The tenth novella released in September 2019, with the second volume coming at the beginning of 2020.

We all remember what happened in 2020. March 11, I believe, was the day management came onto the floor and said everyone needed to be out of the building within 90 minutes, but an hour would be better. Take your computers unless you planned to use a personal computer. Take anything personal you wanted at home.

Honestly, that would have been a very ideal time for me to enter a second golden age of writing. I was free of projects, having completed The Deadly Studies but… I’d been cranking those novellas out at the rate of 3 a year for 3 years, plus the time before the first release. So call it 4 years, pushing toward 5.

I was burned out. Completely. I tried doing some editing of stuff I’d previously written, but my passion and heart weren’t there. It felt… forced.

It was sometime in early 2021 that I finally confessed to myself that I was afraid I was burned out and might never write again.

It was in mid-to-late 2022 when I accepted I was done as an author. Life was okay. I had gotten a townhouse (thanks, Covid housing market!) and was still very focused on chainmail. I was more into gaming again, which I hadn’t really been through a lot of my golden age of writing. I had my friends and their kids. I was working from home and it was glorious. I missed writing, but I’d come to terms with being past that part of my life.

Turned out… words weren’t done with me.

THE GOLDEN AGE (~2009-2019)
​
After college and entering the workforce, things definitely changed for a bit, but not as much as I expected at first. My first desk job— working the drive thru at a bank— actually gave me bits and pieces of time to crank out words. If things were slow and my drawer was in good shape, there was nothing really to do. It was in this time period that I first discovered NaNoWriMo and put out my first novel. (The REALLY bad one). 

Honestly, I can safely say that 2009-2019 was, so far, my golden age of writing. I was cranking out thousands of words most days. I definitely hit my first million words somewhere in there… my guess would be around 2013, if not earlier, honestly. I’ve never calculated and couldn’t if I wanted to. But I’d say definitely by then, I was well and truly past a million words.

It was my job after I left the bank that really blossomed things, and that happened in the middle of 2011. I started working at a call center, and it had… amenities. A cafeteria, a very nice on-site employee gym with showers, a “relaxation room” with a couple couches and a white noise machine. It was honestly kinda like being on campus again. I practically lived there for seven years. I also got into the best shape of my life… briefly… until work stress stole it from me. 

But I digress. By this time, I had a laptop and a lot of habits. I’d get up at, no kidding, 4:15 in the morning, drive the 50ish minutes to the call center to get a good parking spot and be there when the gym opened at 5:30. I’d get in at least an hour workout, get a shower, and have breakfast, all usually before 7 or 7:15. My work shift usually was 8-5 or 9-6, so the rest of that time was my writing time. 

Even better was when I got a promotion that took me to a different department, OFF the phones. It was still busying work, but this gave me the freedom to listen to music while I processed things, and my playlists got old pretty quick (this was in the days of iPods). So I started seeking other audio input. I found podcasts, podiobooks, and eventually audiobooks. Many podcasts I listened to were fiction based or about writing, and I eventually started one of my own that ran from 2014-2020, The Melting Potcast (RIP).

It was also somewhere in here that I had multiple 10,000+ word days. I almost had a 20,000-word day, but… that was a rough day. 

And the words were not that great. It was in here where… well, I’ve talked about NaNoWriMo before and what it taught me. I switched to quality over quantity in here.

In 2016, I got ANOTHER promotion to another offline department, and this was one that was even less work-intense. It was a monitoring hub for a bunch of nationwide call center departments, and unless there was a crisis going on, there was actually little to do. A lot of my coworkers spent their time reading, studying for certifications, all kinds of stuff. 

I generally did this: first couple hours, writing. I usually had some sort of goal: a chapter or two, a plot point, editing, something like that. Once I got through it… I usually started chainmailing, because it was in 2015 that that craft finally came barreling into my life. I was still cranking out a good thousand words on a good day. It was also during this time that most of my published works came out: Starsigns, Criminal From Birth, and The Deadly Studies being the most notable.

In early 2018, I got the bad news: the call center was closing. It was going to be relocate, take a BIG demotion and go back on the phones in a different department (but at a call center closer to home), or take severance.

I took severance. I lost my gym, my power naps, and all the easy writing time I’d been enjoying for the last few years. It was… very different, I’ll say. 

June was a lot more wild than I expected.
​
Short Story (working title “Recalled”) - Officially on the back burner. I put what I have so far up on here. I won’t be tracking this story anymore.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. It’s been rough. Still mulling over the title.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Chapter one rewrite is done, and first shot at chapter two is done and it’s ready to be rewritten. Chapter one ended at 3266, and chapter two is at 1199, so I did 3229 words for the month.

June’s schedule got insane again rather unexpectedly. Not complaining. It was really good. July is the last wild month I SHOULD have through the end of the year. Some travel days will be cutting into my writing time, so there’s that to worry about. But August does bring back D&D time, so there will be that too.

What I’ve been working on has been good though. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, right?

Collaboration Project - I need to get in touch with my author friend and get working on this.

My writing habits are… not at their best right now. I guess… I’d kinda like to tell you a story about my writing habits and how things have been over the years.
​
THE BEGINNING (~1995-2008) 

I started writing in middle school. I was very much the precocious child, one of the “smart” kids or nerds. I was in elementary, middle, and most of high school through the 90s, very much in the hayday of putting all the “weird” kids in the Gifted program. I was in Gifted starting in 2nd grade. Of course, now I realize it’s where public schools put a lot of the neurodivergent kids. My classmates then, I recognize now as various functional autists, with plenty of ADHD sprinkled in. Turned out I was autistic, but anyway. I mention this just to illustrate that school itself was… not really much of a challenge for me. I was never skipped grades, though I was one of the youngest in my class (I turned 18 2.5 months after graduating high school). However, I was also one of the well-behaved kids. I didn’t and still don’t like confrontation. My autism very much manifests with strenuous rules of conduct and behavior. So I got very good at entertaining myself in class when bored.

In middle school that entertainment became writing. It persisted through most of high school and college. If I was in class and had already managed to do my homework or in-class assignments, I was writing. It wasn’t until I was in my gap year between high school and college that I finally got a dedicated desktop computer of my own, and I started typing rather than hand-writing everything. Yeah, I’m that old. 
​
That computer got me through college, and if I wasn’t in class/rehearsal or at a recital (oh the joys of music majors) then I was… probably reading or writing. Between classes, it was reading, since I didn’t have a laptop, but in my dorm room, it was usually writing. 

So, a writer buddy of mine whom I’ve worked with before reached out to me yesterday, mostly to chat. However, it being the two of us, naturally we started talking writing. Long story short, we were discussing our current projects (mine being my LitRPG novel and his being book 15 in his urban fantasy series) and the idea came up between us to do a collaborative work again.

It’s been ages since I’ve worked with him, so naturally I started getting the brain juices going. He suggested science fiction as a genre, since we both dabble in it but haven’t done a lot to focus on it. I suggested a format: correspondence between two characters over relativity-necessary timelapses. The thought mostly stemmed from my irregular schedule, trying to think of something that would be manageable to eke out time for. But I also have tried collaborations before, and one of the places where I most notice issues for me is writing style. Unless one person is focusing on the writing, things can get distorted due to multiple writing styles between authors. Even if one goes back and rewrites everything to be cohesive… it’s still something I wanted to avoid. So two different people corresponding… that would make more sense.

Our brainstorm developed from there and… I think we’re going to at least give it a shot. We have basic framework, basic plot, and even a friggin’ working title already. 

So… I guess we’ll see!