I have always had a creative side and a vivid imagination. I started my career as a scientist, with a Ph.D. in pharmacology, doing basic research in drug development. It was a very creative job, in that everything that I did, every hypothesis, every experiment was original, came from my own mind.
I left that work to become an FDA drug reviewer, and while a fun job, it was not as creative because I was reviewing other people’s work.
Then I retired three years ago, and started writing fiction novels. I started with two dark murder mysteries, GUARDIAN ANGEL: UNFORGIVEN, and GUARDIAN ANGEL: INDOCTRINATION, and I just finished a new comedy murder mystery, PLEASURIA: Take as Directed, to be published by Koehler Books (launch November 24, 2018).
I discovered that writing novels really gets my creative juices flowing, even moreso than the basic research that I did earlier in my career. The writing of a novel is only limited by the extent of my imagination, and with this new comedy murder mystery I really went for an unusual and unique story. This is, by far, the most stimulating and interesting thing that I have ever done.
There is a frustrating side to writing, and that’s the marketing of the final product, the book.
I spent months sending query letters and synopses to hundreds of potential literary agents and publishers for my first two books, the dark murder mysteries, and received rejection after rejection. I finally self-published them on Amazon, and have had some success.
I must be better at writing comedy, because within two weeks of sending out query letters and synopses for ‘PLEASURIA: Take as Directed’ to about twenty agents and publishers, I heard back from two publishers, both of whom said basically the same thing, that the book was fun to read and made them laugh out loud.
I have to say, that felt really good after all the many rejections from the first two books. Anyhow, I am very grateful that I have found a publisher for PLEASURIA: Take as Directed, and I have already begun to write the second book in the series.
To recap:
- Writing is an absolute blast and
- Don’t let the rejections get you down, just keep writing!