rolanni | Reality Check: So you want to be a writer

Constructed by

autopope, and turned into the wild with permission to use%.

* Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 4

* Age when I "wrote" my first story: 4 (by copying out "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin." Happily, my father pointed out the copyright issues.)

* Age when I got my hands on a typewriter: 14

* Age when I wrote my first novel: This is difficult. I told myself stories all the time; however, I didn't live in an environment where it was safe to commit such things to paper.

* Novels written between age 4 and age 34: 4

* Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 24

* Thickness of file of rejection slips prior to first story sale: I have no idea; the rejection slips file with the story

* Age when I sold my first short story: 28

* Age when I first came close to selling a novel: 25

* Age when that first book deal imploded (prior to publication): 25

* Age when I first sold a non-fiction book: n/a

* Age when I landed a (paid, monthly) magazine column: n/a. I freelanced for a couple of local newspapers for a few years.

* Age when I next wrote a saleable novel: 32

* Age when that novel was published: 36

* Age when the second saleable novel finally sold: 35

* Age when a short story was first shortlisted for the Hugo award: LOL

* Age when the second saleable novel came out: 36

* Age when the third saleable novel came out: 37

* Age when the fourth saleable novel came out: 47

* Age when I first won a Hugo award: LOLx2

* Age when I finally shut down the day-job and became a full-time novelist: 50

* Age when the money coming in exceeded my previous employment: 51

* Age when I returned to the day-job because of publisher implosion: 55

* Age now: 56

* Number of books sold: 20 (novels), 2 (short story collections), edited anthology: 1

* Number of titles in print: 17 (one way or another)

* Number of titles fallen out of print: 1

%Consider this an LJ-meme: if you write professionally, feel free to post your own equivalent of this list. (Obviously you'll need to customize it to track your career path -- but you get the idea.)