When did you first start writing?
In elementary school, we would write short stories and read them aloud to the class. I soon came to love this practice, since even though I didn't have a lot of friends, the other kids seemed to like my stories. After a "story day," kids who wouldn't normally talk to me would high-five me and give me pats on the back. It was kind of confusing, because I didn't think the things I wrote were that different from the way I talked normally, but I realized that for some reason, even kids who didn't like me liked my writing. I'd like to say that ignited a passion for writing, but I actually didn't start writing regularly outside of school until much, much later. I'm not sure if it was laziness or contrariness, but despite these early experiences, I more or less ignored the call for a long time. Instead, I became obsessed with learning how to draw comics, and that kept me occupied for quite a while.
What motivated you to become an indie author?
Failure! Well, kind of.
I was drawing a webcomic called Sterling for a long time, years in fact, but I could never quite get where I wanted with it. I was always unhappy with my art, and I didn't seem to have the temperament to keep to a regular update schedule. Eventually I started fantasizing about skipping the whole difficult drawing process and just writing down my story. However, I didn't just want to rewrite my comic as a novel; that would be dull. Instead, I was intrigued by the idea of exploring alternate-universe versions of my characters; whereas Sterling was fairly realistic with a slight fantasy twist, The Familiar Series became a proper fantasy story. So Sam, who was a (basically) normal human being who had some dark imagery associated with him in the comic, became a full-on demon in the books, and so on.
Sometimes I feel like I betrayed my original world; that the older version of Sterling is still waiting for me to come back and finish it some day. However, not only does writing seem to suit me far better than comics, but readers have reacted with much more enthusiasm to the books than they ever did to the comic, so I think it was a worthwhile move overall.
However, now that I know I like writing novels, I have ideas for books that weren't originally meant to be something else entirely...err, I mean, I hope I'm capable of writing a book without having to draw a failed webcomic first:).
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