The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.

My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.

During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.