Before she was a novelist, Holly Lisle was an RN, mostly in the ER. In November of 1992, however, a three-book deal with Baen and quite a few moments of sequential insanity led to her holding a uniform-burning party in her back yard --- which her writers-group friends attended --- putting her nursing license in mothballs, and going full-time as a writer.
In spite of numerous subsequent adventures in financing (she is the master of foods made with canned beans and pasta), she never looked back.
She has now published several million of words of both fiction and nonfiction, and with thirty-two commercially published novels behind her and more than a million books in print, has fully embraced being her own publisher.