This Writer’s Life

If you've never written a book, you probably picture an author sitting alone in a quiet room, fingers dancing across a keyboard until a finished manuscript appears. It's a comforting image—but it has never been entirely true. Every book I've written has been shaped by editors, critique partners, beta readers, and the encouragement of my wife and others. The people around me changed over the years, but so did the tools.

If you ask most people about a significant turning point in their lives, they’ll mention marriage, the birth of a child, or a career—or perhaps all three. Those were important for me as well, but there was another moment that changed my life. The first book I ever read from cover to cover was Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Starman Jones, published in 1953. Yes, it literally changed my life.