Even before I could read, I loved stories. Books were full of magic, and wonder, and unexplored worlds waiting to be discovered.

In the first grade we used to have story time. In the heat of the summer the teacher would turn off the lights and we would lay our heads down on the cool surface of our desks as she read a chapter of the Boxcar Children, or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, How to Eat Fried Worms, or Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. My father was a reader. He would carry tattered paperbacks with him everywhere.

I always wanted to read grown up books--real novels--instead of the picture books for children my age. In the third grade I tried to read "Battlefield Earth". It was just too big a book and I never finished it.

But, In the fourth grade we were given an assignment to write a story. I wrote a SF story called "Journey to Planet X". The heroes of the story were me and four of my friends from the neighborhood. I think that's when I got the bug, that's when I wanted to write.

After that, I tried writing and drawing comics. The art wasn't very good. But my heart was in it.

When I attended college, I had started a blog called Expand Your Reach [ http://a-r-williams.livejournal.com/ ]. I wrote about the various aspects of the writing craft. I also became more interested in how to get my work published through traditional means. I became very focused on learning more about the professional side of writing: submitting to magazines, writing to agents, preparing manuscripts and such.

At the time, self-publishing through e-Books was still relatively new. And I still had the old writer mentality about how self-publishing was bad because it didn't provide the same opportunities that traditional publishing did. The first time I discovered Dean Wesley Smith's 'myths of publishing posts' and J.A. Konrath going on and on about how great self-publishing was I dismissed what they had to say because of that old traditional mindset.

Then when searching for content for my blog, I found a Seth Godin lecture where he talked about the weakness of traditional publishing. And as they say "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear". It just clicked and I finally understood that e-publishing was not the same as trying to self-publish through print. I understood how the world had changed.

I hungered to learn more. I started reading the blogs of Dean Wesley Smith, J.A. Konrath, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Mike Shatzkin. I absolutely consumed their content, then I had to go tell my fellow bloggers what I discovered. I wrote a blog post about how I had been wrong and how self-publishing through e-books was a good idea.

Needless to say, there were a few heated discussions about whether I was right or not. But once a blind man gets his vision fixed, he doesn't want to go back to being blind again.

Self-publishing is freedom!

I have the ability of my work to succeed or fail based on what I bring to the table.

There's a point when writing that is pure bliss. Everything flows. The mind is racing, full of ideas, and dreams, and images. Your fingers fly across the keyboard as fast as they can, because you have to capture that flow, that elusive, intangible thought before it fleas and escapes into the ether. That feeling is rare, but it is magic.

It's magic to steadily progress. To see where you were, to unravel where you're going.

It's magic when you build worlds and create characters and set them out on adventures and journeys that you might not even know how it's going to end. Or if they'll survive. There's joy in the telling of the tale, pleasure in the crafting of it, of molding it, of taking the obstacles and wrangling over them with your mind and seeing the possibility of what that story could be, the directions it could go.

Why put up with the difficulties? For the love it. That's the only thing that makes it worth it.

Ideas are everywhere. They come from my thoughts, my emotions, my beliefs. They come from life and experiences that I've had or seen others go through. They come from questions, from wonder. They come from examining, and studying, and probing, and asking-"What if?"

I can start with an idea, an image, a character, or a setting. Beginnings are easy for me. I know what questions to ask, I know what's needed to create a good beginning. Beginnings are exciting, they're full of hope. But they can be dangerous because I often want to start with the new idea that seems fresher, better than what I'm currently working on.

But once I have a character, I ask - "What does this person want? What opposes them?"

Those two questions can bring much of the story to fruition.

George R.R. Martin - Few writers revolutionize what a genre can be. Some manage to push the envelope just a nudge. Tolkien with Lord of the Rings, R.E. Howard with Sword & Sorcery, now Martin with "A Song of Ice and Fire". Fantasy will never be the same again. The brilliance of "A Song of Ice and Fire" is it allows each character, even many of the villains, to have heroic characteristics. There are layers of good and bad. And real consequences for what the characters choose to do.

Lois McMaster Bujold - I love the relationship she built between Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith. I love her ability to get into a characters head, reveal their emotion, their thoughts, the beating essence of their heart and their dreams and to lay it out for the reader to enjoy.

Margaret Weiss & Tracy Hickman - I pretty much became a fan of fantasy fiction because of them. Their world-building and the adventures their characters went on were the most astounding things for me. They made fantasy my favorite genre. I think their ability to craft world is part of the reason I love world-building so much.

They mean everything.

People who love your work and can't wait to read the next adventure are why writers work as hard on their stories as they do. To write only for ourselves, when the stories are all in our heads doesn't require that extra effort, that extra push to make us better. But writing to communicate with other people, to bring something to the craft so that you can create an experience that is as enjoyable for them as it is for you, forces that little extra revision, that little extra attention to detail, and to getting it right.

When people show appreciation for what you do, and the love you put into it--it matters a great deal.

My current work-in-progress is a sword and sorcery adventure story. It takes place in an Aztec / Mayan type setting. Xicahua is a sorcerer who has discovered an ancient medallion that allows him to bring a forgotten power back into existence. Ziraxxus is the warrior determined to stop him. It's full of fight scenes, magic, and adventure. The cover can be seen on my Facebook fanpage. It was drawn by Keith Draws. He does excellent work and has made other covers for me in the past.

[ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151506887236146&set=a.10151506887091146.1073741825.158125546145&type=1&theater ]

I've always been fascinated by the warrior culture and the warrior ethos: brave knights, noble samurai, warriors with an indomitable will to be victorious. I would be a knight, or a samurai, or a barbarian. I would be a defender of the weak and helpless.

There was a writer. He finally figured it all out and dedicated himself to what he loved. From then on he lived happily ever after.