Doing What You Love (The Writing Life Series)

By Janni Lee Simner

Write more and worry less! Move your writing and your passion from the edges to the center of your life as you discover:

•Why writing isn’t all about “talent”
•The value of taking creative risks
•How to embrace imperfection
•Ways to manage doubts and put setbacks in perspective
•Reasons to let your fear—and your joy—take the lead
•The myth of that one big break
•How to choose which advice to listen to—and which to discard
•The power of writing without apologies
•Why following your creative passion may be the most practical thing you can do

Acclaimed author Janni Lee Simner has spent the past quarter century writing books, short stories, interactive fiction, and nonfiction for teens, children, and adults. In Doing What You Love she shares down-to-earth strategies for how to get started—and how to keep going—living a creative life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janni Lee Simner
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370614585

Janni Lee Simner

Janni Lee Simner lives in the Arizona desert, where the plants know how to bite and the dandelions have thorns. In spite of these things—or maybe because of them—she believes she lives in one of the most stunning places on earth.Her post-apocalyptic Bones of Faerie trilogy is set after the war between the human and faerie realms has destroyed the world, leaving behind a land filled with deadly magic. The first book, Bones of Faerie, was dubbed, “Pure, stunning, impossible to put down or forget,” by World Fantasy Award winner Jane Yolen. School Library Journal describes the second book, Faerie Winter, as, “A hauntingly exquisite portrait of a postapocalyptic world.”She’s also the author of Thief Eyes, a contemporary young adult fantasy based on the Icelandic sagas; of the kids’ adventure story Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer; of the short-story collection Unicorn Seasons; and of three more novels and more than 30 more short stories, including appearances in Welcome to Bordertown and Cricket magazine.To learn more about visit her online at www.simner.com.

Book preview

Doing What You Love

I love telling stories more than almost anything in this world.

I’ve been publishing those stories for more than two decades now. Sometimes I’ve written full-time. Other times I’ve written in the evenings after a paying day job, or alongside other freelance work.

Through it all, I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I’ve come to believe that doing what we love isn’t about how much money we’re earning or whether others consider us professionals, though both money and professional recognition can make it easier to create. (They can also make it harder.)

Doing what we love is about building a life around the thing we love—about putting it at the center of our lives, among the handful of things we consider first when making decisions and deciding how to spend our time, rather than holding it at a safe distance, where it’s one of the things we consider last.

I’m going to talk about some of the things I’ve learned about doing what I love, but first, I’m going to talk a little about my own writing journey.

It’s been more than two decades since I sold my first short story and almost as long since I sold my first novel, but I began telling stories long before then. I’ve been telling stories nearly all my life, since long before I knew how to put words on the page. Stories were my escape, my way of having fun, my way of making sense of the world. No matter how bad things got, I knew I could handle anything, so long as I had a few stories to keep me company. When things were going well, when I was happy and loved the world and wanted to say so, it was stories I turned to as well.

By high school I was filling notebooks with stories. I still have those notebooks, loose-leaf binders filled with tattered hand-written pages, many of them written in school and even during my classes, when I was supposed to be paying attention.

During those years, my parents told me two somewhat contradictory things about being a writer.

The first was that I should follow my dreams, because I could be anything I wanted, anything at all.

The second was that writing was a fine hobby, but I couldn’t make a living at it, so I needed to do something else.

At the time there were so many other things I wanted to be—everything from a ballerina to a nuclear physicist, and not only a writer—so I was okay with that. Since I loved science and understanding how the world worked as much as I loved