I’m not sure exactly when I decided to become a writer. Even though I began reading and enjoying reading at a very young age, I didn’t think at the time about writing. I even flunked out of college the first time. Too much beer, too many parties. But a few years after that I went back and finished and became a newspaper journalist – a professional writer getting paid to do it. It wasn’t until a few years before I went to graduate school that I started writing short stories. Now I have written eight novels and three have been published, but the first one was written just five years ago. Eight in five years—not bad. That’s the power of motivation and commitment. That’s how novels get written. You write on one every day and you never give up. You adopt Tom Petty’s lyrics as a mantra — “You can stand me up at the gates of hell but I won’t back down.”
