I did not spend years planning to become an author. Honestly, this whole thing started less than a year ago.

Last October, I was sick, out of school, and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with myself. For years, my life had been pointed in a completely different direction. I was studying molecular neuroscience. The plan was school, medicine, eventually medical school—the whole long road. Then illness interrupted it.

Suddenly, I wasn't going to class. I wasn't working. I wasn't moving toward the future I had spent years preparing for, and I had a lot more time to think than I particularly wanted. Some of the writing started as reflection. Some of it came out of things I was working through in therapy. I was trying to put experiences, fears, illness, faith, and everything that had happened into words.

And somewhere along the way, something changed. I remembered that I actually loved telling stories. Not publishing. Not marketing. Not building an “author brand.” None of that was even on my radar. Just storytelling.

One thing turned into another, an idea started becoming characters, those characters became a story, and in October 2025 I started writing what would eventually become my debut novel. So no, becoming an author wasn't exactly the plan. It sort of happened while the original plan was falling apart. Which makes everything that has happened since then even stranger.

Apparently Writing the Book Was Only One Job

When I realized I was actually going to finish a novel, I had a fairly reasonable assumption about what being an author involved. You write books. That seems self-explanatory.

You sit somewhere dramatically, preferably near a window while it rains, drink coffee, stare thoughtfully into the distance, and occasionally type something profound. Maybe you complain about writer's block. Maybe someone eventually takes a picture of you standing beside an unnecessarily large bookshelf. Author. Simple.

Apparently, I completely misunderstood the job description.

Somewhere between starting my first manuscript last October and publishing it this year, I became a writer, editor, marketer, graphic designer, website manager, social media manager, advertiser, audiobook producer, casting director, audio editor, event planner, salesman, publicist, email marketer, and whatever job title belongs to the person who refreshes sales dashboards while pretending he isn't refreshing sales dashboards.

And somewhere in there, I'm supposed to write another book. That part seems important.

Everything Happened Very Fast

That's probably the strangest part of this entire experience. I'm still extremely new at this. I started seriously writing fiction in October. My debut novel released in May. Now, only a few months later, I'm talking about editorial reviews, awards, bookstores, audiobook distribution, social media strategy, book festivals, and future manuscripts. Sometimes I have to remind myself how ridiculous that timeline actually is.

I didn't spend ten years learning the publishing industry before putting a book out. I didn't study creative writing or literature in college. I didn't come into this knowing how traditional publishing worked, how independent publishing worked, or why an author apparently needs to know what metadata is. I learned because suddenly I needed to.

And somewhere after finishing the manuscript, I had another realization: I actually thought I had written something good. So naturally my next thought was, okay, I guess now I need an agent.

That began another education.

I started querying literary agents and, like most new writers quickly discover, rejection becomes part of the routine. I tried different kinds of agents, including people working around Christian publishing, and for a while I kept querying while continuing to edit the manuscript. Most responses were rejections or silence, but a couple of agents gave me genuinely encouraging feedback. They saw commercial potential in the story—one even mentioned being able to imagine it working on screen—but ultimately they didn't feel comfortable representing it or weren't sure where they could place it.

That confused me at first because I assumed the main question would be whether the writing was good enough. I slowly realized that publishing asks another question too: Where does this fit, and who knows how to sell it?

That became complicated for me because the kind of fiction I want to write is very character-driven. I want people to feel like they're living inside someone else's experience. I care about trauma, wounds, faith, guilt, suffering, contradictions, and the fact that human beings are rarely clean little categories of good person and bad person. I want characters to be complicated because people are complicated. If something terrible happens to them, I don't just want it to move the plot forward. I want the reader to understand what it does to the person afterward.

As I started reading more recently published fiction, I also began noticing how differently books can be constructed for different audiences. Some move incredibly fast. Some depend heavily on plot momentum or a strong concept. Some intentionally spend far less time sitting inside a character's psychology than I naturally do. None of that automatically makes those books worse—it just made me realize that what I had written might be harder to neatly position than I originally understood.

And that left me with a decision I wrestled with for months. I could keep waiting and hoping to find the right person to represent the manuscript, or I could change the book substantially to make it easier to place. But I kept coming back to the same problem: the parts that might make it harder to categorize were also the parts I meant.

I didn't want to strip the story down until it became easier to pitch but stopped being the story I had actually tried to tell.

So while I kept editing, I kept debating independent publishing. About a month before release, I finally reached the point where I thought: you know what? Let's just do it.

That was how I ended up publishing independently.

Not because I had spent years planning to become an indie author, and not because I decided traditional publishing had nothing to offer me. I still have a lot of respect for it, and I would absolutely like to work with an agent and traditional publisher in the future.

I just reached a point where I believed enough in this particular story to stop waiting for someone else to give me permission to put it into the world.

Then came the next surprise.

I published it and thought releasing it would feel like crossing the finish line. It did. For approximately twelve minutes. Then I realized I had actually crossed the starting line, because now people had to know the book existed.

That introduced me to an entirely different world: book reviews, ARCs, editorial reviews, advertising, social media, bookstores, awards, author websites, email lists, festivals, signings, distribution, keywords, and metadata.

And yes, apparently metadata is something I have opinions about now. A year ago, if you had asked me what metadata was, I probably would've assumed it was something Mark Zuckerberg was being questioned about in Congress. Now I'm sitting around wondering whether mine is optimized.

Life comes at you fast. 

Then Somehow I Made an Audiobook

Because apparently I looked at the existing workload and thought: You know what would really simplify things? Audio production. So now there's an audiobook.

Making one introduced me to another collection of skills I had absolutely no expectation of learning: casting, recording, editing, sound design, volume levels, distribution, quality control, and listening to the same sentence enough times that individual words stop sounding like actual English.

There is a special form of psychological warfare involved in editing your own voice for several hours. Eventually you hear yourself say something like, “He walked toward the door,” for the seventeenth time and begin questioning whether doors have ever existed.

But this week, the audiobook officially released. And despite everything that came with getting it there, that was pretty incredible.

Something that began as me sitting at home, sick and trying to put thoughts into words, eventually became a manuscript. Then it became a physical book. And now somebody can put headphones on and hear that same story performed. That's cool. I don't care how many books I eventually write. That's cool.

Doing This While Recovering Has Been… Interesting

There's another part of this story that doesn't always translate well onto social media. I've been building all of this while recovering.

And recovery is strange because sometimes your ambition returns much faster than your body does. Your brain starts saying: “We should do twelve things today.” Your body responds: “That's adorable.”

There are days when I feel productive and hopeful and completely convinced that I can make a real career out of this. There are other days when everything feels heavier than it should. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't stressful. It is.

I'm trying to recover physically while also building something professionally, and those two things don't always move at the same speed. Part of me wants to go. Write another book. Make another video. Contact another bookstore. Research another festival. Finish another chapter. Make another audiobook. Figure out traditional publishing. Learn advertising. Grow the audience.

And then sometimes my body reminds me that I'm still recovering from the thing that put me here in the first place. Learning how to respect both realities has been difficult.

Patience is significantly more inspirational when somebody else has to practice it.

And Yes, I Think About Literary Prestige

Something else I've discovered very quickly is that writers want their work to be taken seriously. At least I do.

I'm independent right now, and I'm proud of what I've managed to build independently. At the same time, I'm interested in the traditional literary world. Agents. Major publishers. Respected editorial reviews. Awards. Bookstores. Critics. There is still a kind of literary prestige attached to those things.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging that. I'd love to work with an agent someday. I'd love to traditionally publish a future novel. I'd love to find out what my writing looks like after working with an experienced publishing team and editor.

I'd also love to walk into a bookstore one day and discover one of my books there without having personally emailed, called, introduced myself, explained the book, and politely begged someone to consider stocking it. Preferably face-out. I'm dreaming big here.

But I'm also already beginning to understand the danger of making recognition the finish line. Because there is always another thing. Another review. Another award. Another publisher. Another sales number. Another follower milestone. Another person whose approval seems like it might finally make you feel legitimate.

If I start believing that the next achievement is the thing that will officially make me an author, I could spend the rest of my career moving the finish line.

Recognition matters to me. But I'm trying to learn how to appreciate it without worshiping it.

The Business Side Can Mess With Your Head

This has probably been one of the biggest surprises. Writing is creative. Publishing is creative. Trying to make writing into an actual career is also very much a business. And businesses have numbers.

Suddenly you're thinking about advertising costs, royalties, website clicks, conversion rates, promotional spending, event costs, production costs, and whether the thing you just paid money for accomplished anything whatsoever. Something that started as an intensely personal story can become very mathematical very quickly.

You can spend months creating something you care deeply about and then find yourself staring at your phone wondering why 79 people clicked a link and apparently all 79 collectively decided: “Interesting.” Anyway.

That's publishing, apparently.

Sometimes something works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you have absolutely no idea whether it worked because the platform responsible for reporting the numbers seems to update whenever it feels spiritually led to do so. And when you're spending real money trying to build this into something sustainable, that uncertainty can become stressful.

I'm learning that believing in my writing doesn't mean endlessly spending money on it. There is a difference between investing in a career and trying to purchase reassurance that the career is working. I'm still figuring out where that line is.

I'm Learning in Public

One thing I want to be careful about as I build this career is pretending I know more than I do. I don't.

I'm ten months into this. I didn't study literature. I'm not a publishing veteran. I haven't spent twenty years writing novels. I'm learning almost everything as I encounter it.

And strangely, I think I'm becoming okay with that.

Maybe part of what I can share isn't, “Here is how the publishing industry works because I have mastered it.”

Maybe it's: “Here's something I learned this week.” “Here's something I got wrong.” “Here's what happened when I tried this.” “Here's the book I'm reading.” “Here's something I'm wrestling with as a Christian and a writer.” “Here's the next thing I'm trying to understand.”

That's more honest anyway.

I'm not standing at the top of the mountain explaining the route. I'm somewhere on the trail yelling back: “There's a weird hole over here. Don't step in that.”

Useful information.

The Part I Keep Coming Back To

Underneath all of this, though, there's still the thing that started it. Storytelling.

Not advertising. Not awards. Not publishing prestige. Not social media. Not sales dashboards. Story.

There is still this strange thing that happens when I sit down to write and a place that didn't exist begins to exist. People who didn't exist start talking. They develop personalities. They make decisions. They surprise me.

Sometimes they completely ruin the outline I specifically created for them.

Very disrespectful.

And suddenly I'm inside the story again.

That's what I rediscovered last year. It wasn't some carefully constructed career plan. It was something I found while trying to understand what was happening to my life.

I had lost the path I thought I was supposed to be walking, and in the middle of that, I found an old love again. Telling stories.

Now I'm trying to figure out what happens if I take that seriously.

Maybe That's What Becoming an Author Actually Looks Like

Maybe becoming an author isn't one dramatic moment. Maybe it isn't publishing the first book. Maybe it isn't signing with an agent. Maybe it isn't winning something. Maybe it isn't hitting a particular number.

Maybe it's repeatedly choosing to do the work. Write the next chapter. Learn the thing you don't understand. Make the mistake. Fix the mistake. Embarrass yourself slightly. Keep going.

And eventually you look backward and realize you've built something.

I'm still very early in this. Some days I feel like I know exactly what I'm doing. Other days I'm basically three Google searches in a trench coat pretending to run a publishing company.

But I'm here.

Ten months ago, I hadn't even started my debut novel. Now that novel is published. Its audiobook is out in the world. I've started writing more stories. I'm learning the industry. I'm recovering. I'm trying to get better at all of it.

And I have absolutely no idea where this will lead.

I would love for writing to become my full-time career. I would love to publish more books, continue growing independently, and eventually see what doors might open in traditional publishing.

But I'm trying not to run so far ahead that I miss what's already happened.

Less than a year ago, I was writing partly because I needed somewhere to put everything I was carrying. Somewhere along the way, I remembered that I loved telling stories. And somehow that became a book.

Then it became an author career I'm now trying to build.

That wasn't the plan. But sometimes the thing you weren't planning for turns out to be the thing worth following.

We'll see where it goes.

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