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job. How many people could say that?
    Even if it was a creative profession, I was still a disciplined person who was sometimes a little too organized for the typical artists. Then again, I attributed that to the reason I’d been professionally writing for over four and a half years and never had a day of writer’s block. Either way, it worked best for me to have a plan, a work week track to know what fell on which days and where the path was I was supposed to be on no matter how crazy things got so I knew which way to veer back to.
    It just worked for me. Fuck, I didn’t know why or how… It simply did .
    I was happy when I shut down my computer at nine and grabbed my lists of potential names I kept in their file folders. I knew one name I was going to use for the main character—there was only one true main character since I wrote in first person—since he’d been in one of the previous series books. This wasn’t one of my serials, so it wasn’t a sequel where it was always the same main character.
    Since this was a series book, it was going to be a previous main character’s brother, and it was this guy’s turn for happiness. Now I just had to name his mate. I grabbed a hard cider and my smokes on the way out to the deck to figure out who I wanted to match up my new main character with, loving this part of my job probably best of all. The inception of a new book was what had me bounding out of bed. It was always the bright and shiny part, new and hopeful and something that could be so great.
    Not only a story I knew I would love, put my full attention into, but a little piece of my soul into because I didn’t do anything halfway. It was just who I was. But tomorrow I would open a blank Word document that in a few months would end up on someone’s e-reader and just for a bit, maybe only a few hours, they wouldn’t have to worry about their bills, or their own toilet being broken, or family drama, or that their own dog had passed, or whatever in their lives that was the same shit we all dealt with.
    I would give them a break. What I would start to create tomorrow would be their break . I would tell them a story that maybe just for a little while made them forget about the harsh world around them we all lived in, and there, in that place I would create, the world would be better, fairer, more just, more forgiving, more loving of everyone, no matter who they were or what they were. A place where it didn’t matter where they came from or what connections they had, where right was right and good was rewarded and evil was punished.
    A world I would want to live in and hoped our reality could be more like one day.
    Yes, even with the paranormals, because I liked paranormals. And I was the author so I got to add them. But the principle was the same either way. That was why I loved starting a new book as much as I did. It was why I ignored the junk that bogged down most authors, and when things got tough, I went back to doing what I was supposed to be doing—telling stories. Because I needed them, and I hoped somewhere out there they did what they were meant to do… Give someone a break from real life.
    And honestly, it was why I got out of bed in the morning. I was an artist and it might be on the computer but that was my canvas. There was nothing like the high of fitting the pieces together of a good story. It was like sex and driving too fast and the best ice cream wrapped all into one. I remembered someone asking me once if I did drugs when they heard I was an author, because they’d heard all artists or authors did or were drunks.
    I just looked at them and blinked before asking, “Why? Writing is my drug.” I wasn’t a psychologist, and I damn well wasn’t good at talking about my feelings, but I did think that if a person needed to drink or do drugs to get through their job that maybe, just maybe , it wasn’t the right job for them.
    But what did I know? There were probably people who thought the same