The overwhelmingly positive feedback gave me the courage to submit my stories to a publisher (under another name at this time) and voila! I am an established writer with six or seven titles to my credit.

Slowly, however, due to the observations, recommendations, and advice of people in the know, I began to spend more time in social forums than writing. I’m on chat lists, and Facebook. Twitter, tumblr, and Pinterest. I have several blogs and multiple websites. And while I don’t discount the value of social media, I do think in some cases, it turns into a deadly distraction and a disabling crutch.

Because it is *easy*. It’s easy to fritter away several hours of your precious free time in the name of ‘catching up’ and ‘getting your name out there.’ For social networking to work, you have to be social–you have to chit-chat, and comment on other people’s blogs, and like their Facebook posts. Which is all fine and well–I enjoy that most of the time. But it has become terribly easy to use this as an excuse not to do the harder job of writing. More and more I find myself generating posts that require dialog to the exclusion of finishing the next story. Blame it on the short attention span that the internet fosters, or the addictive nature of our smart phones, or the fact that anyone who works 50-60 hours a week is going to have a hard time mustering the energy to write when they get home at night. What is boils down to is that sometimes, we need to shut off the browser and just *write*. That is our biggest selling tactic after all.

Besides, I miss the days when I couldn’t wait to get home to work on the next chapter…

I do not have the molars to chomp down on chunks of rib-eye beef steaks slow simmered in butter and onions in a skillet so I thin slice it like a slice of shaved roast beef, sandwich sliced, from a deli at a supermarket.

My goals in writing are similar. I write shorts while focusing to make chapters and sections of novels with the thought of a complete story from beginning to the end of 50K words.

The ultimate goal is to continue writing until I have ten complete novels, which I am happy with; and then start marketing the works. Along the way make contacts by sending the finished ones to learn the industry but to not stop writing novels until I have at least ten, which I want to pitch to the big six publishing houses in the world, since the American marketplace is being gobbled up by German companies. It is the high gasoline prices. Europeans still buy the books on paper.

Writing can be a hobby or a career and the writer decides.