This was the kind of pause where your brain suddenly stops, blinks twice, and goes, Wait… are we having an existential moment now? Because I wasn’t emotionally prepared for that today.
The question was simple enough.
“How do you deal with it?”
I smiled politely. That’s usually my default response when people ask questions that could potentially spiral into deep philosophical territory before I’ve had enough coffee.
“How do you write these cozy mysteries,” they continued, “knowing you’ll probably never make any money off them?”
And that’s when the pause really happened. Because technically… they’re not wrong. I have not gotten rich writing paranormal cozy mysteries featuring an enchanted Papillon dog.
Not yet, anyway.
Paramount has not called to option the film rights. Hollywood has not sent a limousine. No one has appeared at my door waving a giant check while dramatic orchestral music swells in the background.
Although if that does happen, I promise to document the entire thing for social media. For research purposes, obviously. But here’s the thing.
Yes, I have not gotten rich.
Also yes, I’ve sold my fair share of books.
Writing, for me, is not something you do because it’s a good financial strategy. If you’re looking for reliable wealth creation, I would gently suggest real estate, technology startups, or inventing a phone charger that doesn’t mysteriously disappear into another dimension the moment you need it.
Writing is not logical like that, it is is something you do because you have to, because if you didn’t… you would likely be in therapy for years.
Believe me - I know what I am talking about.
Stories show up in my head the way unexpected guests show up at your front door. They arrive with suitcases, complicated personalities, and absolutely no intention of leaving until you pay attention to them.
A scene appears.
A character starts talking.
A dog — in my case, a magical Papillon — develops very strong opinions about
absolutely everything.
Before you know it, you’re sitting at your desk trying to keep up while your brain throws plot twists at you like confetti. Writing isn’t optional at that point. It’s survival. If I didn’t write these things down, I suspect my brain would eventually become a very crowded and slightly chaotic storage unit for unfinished stories.
Imagine thousands of characters standing around inside your head tapping their feet impatiently.
“Excuse me,” one of them says. “You were supposed to finish my chapter three weeks ago.”
“Also,” another adds, “the dog would like more dialogue.”
This is the point where writing suddenly becomes the far more practical option.
Even if no one ever read a word I wrote… I would still write, writing isn’t just about publishing books or selling copies or seeing your name on a cover, it's about the moment when a story suddenly comes alive on the page, about the quiet joy of discovering something unexpected about your characters halfway through a chapter.
It’s about laughter when a scene goes in a completely ridiculous direction and somehow becomes better than what you planned.
And sometimes it’s about sitting at your desk thinking, Well… this escalated quickly.
There is a kind of magic in storytelling that’s very hard to explain to people who don’t feel it, and occasionally there’s a very opinionated Papillon dog who probably knows more than she’s telling you. At some point the story becomes real enough that you simply have to follow it wherever it leads. Whether or not it makes you rich is almost beside the point.
Of course, if Paramount is reading this, I remain extremely open to negotiation.
But even without Hollywood calling… I’ll still be here writing the next chapter.
Because some of us were simply born this way.
We don’t choose the stories.
The stories choose us.
And if we ignore them too long, they get very, very persistent.
I don’t write because I expect to get rich, I write because I can’t imagine not writing.
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