[Forward]

Hi Novelspotters:

My name is Carol North. I'm here to blog about becoming and being a writer. This is my first guest blog. Ironically it takes place during a week filled with firsts, including the release of my first romance novel, Love's Reflection. It's taken me a long time to get to this point in my writing career even though several million of my words have been published and paid for, but that part of the story comes later.

At five, I already loved reading and the written word. I recall making the decision to become a writer while walking atop a stack of books I'd made into a "fort." "When I grow up, I'm gonna be a writer," I said, and let that intention direct the rest of my life.

My intention for this guest blog is to share my secrets on writing, getting published, and supporting myself through writing.

Some people say education is the most needed facet of becoming a writer. I believe experience is a more crucial factor to having a successful writing career. The type of experience varies by the person. I can hear you saying "Yeah, sure, but what about Christopher Paolini, the teen author of Eragon? He wasn't old enough to have much experience." Ah, but he did. Paolini was a compulsive reader of fantasy novels when he decided to write one, and being a prodigy helped too. That brings up another misconception about writing--age. Having a first novel published can happen at any age: for Christopher Paolini it was 15; for Jackie Collins it was 31; for Walter Zacharius, founder of Kensington Publishing, it was 82.

My early experience was being a stay-at-home mom and helping my now-ex-husband in a construction company. Oh...and there was that little experience of being initiated to two yogis: Swami Rama of the Himalayas and Harold Schroeppel of Oak Park, Illinois. It was the late 1970s; everyone was into the New Age.

Pursuing a career requires commitment. To become a teacher, for example, you must have a degree, or two. Your degrees must be appropriate to the area of teaching to which you aspire, so you build your life and lifestyle around obtaining an education. It's the same with pursuing a writing career. You may skip the degrees if you want, but you do need to arrange or re-arrange your life to support obtaining your goal.

I didn't let others tell me what to write. Instead, I allowed that decision to come from within, and began my writing career as a technical and medical writer. Members of my writing group looked down on me because they were in the more prestigious fields of copywriting and marketing. I didn't really care what they thought because I was earning a comfortable living and loved what I was doing. A recession hit. Companies cut back, but I had plenty of freelance assignments. A marketing writer who had in the past made fun of my type of writing came to me. She needed to find work or she'd lose her home. I got her a freelance editing job at the National Safety Council, one of my major clients.

Technical and business writing have supported me for more than 20 years. If I had made a shift to copywriting because of peer pressure, I might have been out of work and might have given up writing.

One day I heard a knock, knock in my mind, and the little girl within said, "When I said I wanted to be a writer, I meant a story writer." Oops, back to the computer, and that's what I'll be blogging about this week. The switch to being published in fiction and how I use the tools developed through life experience and in my technical writing career.

See you tomorrow,
Carol