I am sixty-nine years old.

By the time I thought about finally taking my lifelong interest in writing fiction seriously, I realized that I didn’t have the time to sit around and wait for rejection letters or contracts that were not written for my benefit to end up in my mailbox. Add to that, eighteen months, give or take, for a reputable publishing house to get the ball rolling, it seemed like an awfully long time to wait for a book to see the light of day–especially when it took months, maybe years, to write it.

As I so often have done in the past, I took matters into my own hands.

It was not beyond the scope of my wheelhouse to create a publishing house to publish my own work. After spending a few years of my early-mid thirties working ‘day jobs’ in traditional publishing houses–performing random everyday tasks like editing travel guides from British English into American English, formatting books. writing marketing copy, planning book tours, and spending more time than I care to admit meditating next to the photocopier–I thought the only thing holding me back from publishing my own work was funding.

Mind you, this was pre-Internet.

In between then and now, I published my own art and creative writing portfolio website, an international cultural travel guide blog, which turned into a cultural travel and lifestyle stock image website and blog, and spent a number of years working as a tech engineer in Silicon Valley.

Which brings us to today … We now have all the tools where we can put our own work out into the world. Looking at self or independent publishing in the same way I look at publishing my photography or creating my paintings became normal. There is nothing holding me, or anyone else back. I have no time to wait for someone else’s approval. I’m not waiting for permission. If there is no path forward, I will forge my own. Because, why not?

It’s the way of the world now.