Photo by Andreas Wagner on Unsplash
In late 2015, I was miserable. Really miserable. I hated my job. Writing wasn’t working out the way I wanted it to. Overall, I just didn’t like the way my life was happening in that moment in time.
I decided that my best bet for being able to quit my job was to write another novel. I’d had two traditionally published at that point, so I thought I had a fair expectation of being able to sell my new book.
I needed something faster than that, though. So I started blogging about my process. It wasn’t about how I was writing my book, though. It was more about teaching other people how to write theirs.
That was fateful for me. Because it worked. Lots of people wanted to write novels and my method connected. I ended up starting a business teaching other people who to write novels.
Here’s the thing: I had no way of knowing that teaching other people my method of novel writing would change my life. That five years later tens of thousands of people will have become Ninja Writers.
I had to do that work, without knowing. In fact, if I’d had expectations then, they wouldn’t have been for what actually happened. Because I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.
And the truth is, it shouldn’t have worked. Lots of people try to be bloggers or try to start online classes and it doesn’t work. But by March of 2016 I’d earned $40,000, which was enough money to quit my job.