I believe in volunteering. It’s my duty to give back since I have been blessed with much. Understanding that if you work a 40-hour week, it’s tough. Yet, millions of American do it every week. Whether you help out at church, give blood to your local Red Cross or give time to one of your local community activities, being a volunteer is good for the soul. I encourage everyone, at any age, pay it back or forward. Someday, every one of us will need help.

Writing is a solitary endeavor, that is, until you’re done. Then you have content and copy editors, critique groups, beta readers and a host of others wanting to help. During the writing process, I would spend hundreds of hours cramped up in a room, fingers on the keyboard, eyes plastered to the screen while music played in the background. Ideas, sometime fleeting, are written down with haste. On good days, I wished I had three hands to catch up with my thoughts. Still, on other days, when my mind not nearly as focused, very little was accomplished. Regardless of an author’s writing style, genre or mindset, the key to writing is do it daily. And, I do mean every daily. Now I’m at the point that if I miss a day, I feel strange – bad. It’s like a bodybuilder skipping a workout.

 My routine is very simple. Monday through Thursday I write. I set aside two hours a day, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always the same time. Fridays are reserved for editing. Weekends, I eek out an hour or two working on my craft. Mostly researching specific elements of what I wrote from that week.

They say, “Write what you know.” Since my genre are love stories, my books are based on personal experiences, old and new friends, hybrid truths, intense situations and outright fabrications. Yes, being an author allows me to embellish certain events as well as backfill stories to enhance a character’s development. Most of my characters have an element of realism in their persona. The protagonists are used to send an underlying message. More on underlying messages in the future.