I've always loved writing. Stupid songs in high school, short films in college, a blog after college. At the University of Illinois I took a short story class--and at the end was asked by the professor to never take any of her classes ever again.
In January 2006 I entered the real world with a full-time day job--an advertising copywriter. Now I was living and working in downtown Chicago.
In the October 2006, I wrote a piece of fiction for fun that was just a couple hundred words. This would be the first of any pieces of my modern (post-college) era.
I discovered Lulu.com and in March 2007 I was telling friends that I was going to self-print a collection of stories that year. I was so excited, I finished it a month later and was selling copies to my friends in May. I called it Roadside Attractions and the total length was about 20,000 words.
In July 2007, I decided that I was going to write my first novel. I didn't really have characters yet, just ideas. Throughout the fall, I kept brainstorming, working on the plot, crafting any interesting ideas into paragraphs.
Around December 2007, I started creating an outline. It was hard to know if I had too much or too little to work with, but it felt like enough to get started. And around the week of January 25th, 2008, I started writing the first chapter of Autopilot. (It wouldn't be until July 2008 that I landed on the title.)
It took over six months to write the rough draft, including some weeks where that's all I thought about.
My plan was to release it in November 2008, on my 25th birthday. But I didn't know anything about the editing process. It took a lot longer than my short story collection. I let it sit and then made some revisions. Then it was ready for my team of editors, who made some important suggestions.
Autopilot was finally ready for everyone in May 2009. Again I printed copies through Lulu and sold them to friends and co-workers.
In August 2009, I thought I would test the waters and started querying literary agents. I got some good responses, including requests for partials and fulls within three months. Nothing came of that and I came to accept that this novel wasn't going to published traditionally.
So it sat there for all of 2010.
And then in 2011, I discovered that I could self-publish it to the Amazon Kindle marketplace. So on March 1st it went live (which if you've read it, you know couldn't have worked out better as a date).
Autopilot ate up hours upon hours. And I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. I'm even glad that I didn't get picked up by a small press and was able to retain all my rights.
On March 1, 2013 I published Pie for Breakfast, a collection of non-fiction, autobiographical essays. I didn't think I could have a more personal project than Autopilot, but I was wrong.
