What motivated you to become an indie author?
I started publishing in earnest around the year 2002, while I was in grad school. I had some success getting published in small journals and magazines. (In those days, the hopeful author still had to mail printed copies of material to prospective agents and publishers.) Around that time, I moved to Ukraine to start my teaching career, which effectively ended my ability to submit work for publication due to logistics, i.e., an unreliable postal system. When self-publishing services such as Smashwords became popular, I simply decided to take advantage of the opportunity for its low cost and "100 percent acceptance rate" for getting published.
Where do you get your ideas from?
Ideas come to me out of the blue and at the most unexpected times. These ideas often fall outside my immediate realm of thought and experience, which makes me wonder where they really do come from. That said, I have no shortage of ideas for stories; I only lack the time to write them all. When I sit down to write a new story, the question I ask myself is not "what should I write," but rather, "which story should I write." Not all the ideas that come to me are good ones. It is often hard to tell if they are. Sometimes, I don’t know if the idea was really a good one until I have finished the story and then go back to read it.
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