Oct 25
2016

On November 1, 2006, I started writing a novel I conceived specifically for NaNoWriMo. I didn’t expect anything from it, but I posted each chapter online as I finished them. When the novel was finished, the archivist of the site I was using emailed me and said it was a great story and if I ever considered publishing it, she worked as a cover artist for a small company who might want it. That’s the dream, right? So I agreed to submit the novel to them. I didn’t even bother to edit it very much before I sent it in. But on December 19, they replied and said they wanted it! They wanted to publish my book! I was going to be a published author!

That book – On the Air – came out in 2007. I followed that with a novel called Gemini, for which I won a Golden Crown Literary Society Award (a prestigious award for lesbian fiction which no man had ever won before). After that, there was no stopping me. Tilting at Windmills, which was the start of a five book series. World on Fire. The Following Sea. My publisher went out of business after releasing five of my novels, but my friend had just started a company of her own and wanted to use me as an established author just to get off the ground, so I already had a safe haven. The books didn’t slow down.

It’s been ten years since that Halloween night I sat staring at the clock, waiting for it to tick over to midnight so I could officially begin NaNoWriMo. I had the first line ready to go for weeks ahead of time (that line ended up getting edited out of the finished product, naturally). In the years since, I’ve received TWO Golden Crown Awards (still the only man to ever win, as far as I know). I’ve signed up with MGM and Fandemonium novels to write fiction based on Stargate SG-1 (one novel, Two Roads, and two short stories). One of my novels, Trafalgar & Boone, received a starred Kirkus review and was named one of their best indie novels of 2015. And, most amazing of all, one of my novels (Riley Parra) is being turned into a webseries for Tello Films! An actress is in prep right now to play a character I created, and it’s so amazing seeing her post on social media about how much she loves the character. It starts filming in January (you can find out more on Twitter or Tumblr!), and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

I don’t know what I would’ve been doing in November 2006 if it wasn’t for NaNo. I may have eventually written that exact same novel at some point, I probably would have posted it on that site, and everything might have gotten rolling the same way it did in real life. But who knows when that might have happened? NaNo set me off, NaNo got me in a chair and writing, and by that time the following year, I had a published paperback novel in my hand.

Being a writer doesn’t start out with a publishing contract. It doesn’t start with a crash of lightning and a declaration that “THIS will be the ONE…!” It starts with a story, just like it always does, and one line written on a blank page.