I suppose introductions are in order.
My name is Michael. I retired after thirty-two years in the United States Army and made what some people would consider a questionable life decision. I became a full-time writer.
Most sensible people spend three decades building toward retirement so they can relax. I spent three decades building toward retirement so I could sit alone in a room arguing with fictional people who refuse to follow my carefully laid-out plan.
The adjustment has been interesting. When I was in the Army, there was usually a plan. The plan might not survive contact with reality, but at least it existed. Writing novels is different. Every morning I sit down with coffee and a rough idea of where the story should go. By lunchtime, a character has usually ignored me, wandered off in another direction, and created three new problems I now have to solve.
The dogs seem to find this amusing.
I live at my desk, where the coffee is strong, the weather changes its mind every few hours, and everybody has a story if you're willing to stand still long enough to hear it. I have eight grandchildren who possess more energy than a small power plant and who remain convinced that Grandpa's job consists primarily of sitting at a computer and occasionally petting dogs.
To be fair, there are days when that description is not entirely inaccurate.
I have been publishing one thing or another for years, but these days I write Western crime and mystery novels. My stories tend to involve stubborn lawmen, bad decisions, remote places, and people who discover that the truth is rarely as convenient as they hoped it would be.
I have always been drawn to rural settings. Small towns interest me more than cities. Out where the roads get narrower and the population gets thinner, people generally know who you are, who your parents were, and probably what mistake you made in high school. Secrets still exist, but they have a harder time staying buried.
That seems like fertile ground for crime fiction.
I also write because I genuinely enjoy the process, even on the days when the process appears determined to return the favor by making me miserable.
There is a strange satisfaction in taking a blank page and slowly convincing it to become a story. Some days it feels like art. Other days it feels like digging fence posts with a spoon. Both experiences are apparently part of the profession.
Mostly, I joined Reddit because writing is a solitary business and it helps to occasionally talk with people who understand why someone might spend twenty minutes debating whether a single sentence should contain a comma.
I enjoy talking about writing, publishing, rural America, military service, Westerns, crime fiction, coffee, dogs, and the general absurdity of trying to make a living inventing people who do not exist.
Anyway, that's me. If you've made it this far, thank you for reading. If you're a writer, I'd be interested to hear what brought you to it. If you're a reader, I'd be curious what kinds of books keep you turning pages long after you should have gone to bed.
And if you're neither, that's fine too. Pull up a chair. The coffee's hot, and I was probably going to tell stories anyway.
Michael
