Where do you get your ideas?  That’s the question I hear the most from fans and people who don’t spend their lives writing fiction.

I used to give a flip answer---that I bought them from a little shop in Ellicott City, the charming old town just down the road from my house.

Now I tell the truth.  If you’re a writer, ideas for stories whirl around in your mind all the time.  You just have to choose which ones you’re going to develop.

Until a few years ago authors were restricted to writing the stories publishers wanted to buy.  Now there are no restrictions.  You can write anything you want, publish it yourself, and sell your work to readers.

I jumped into the indie market just over a year ago with a novel, DARK MOON, a novella, CHAINED, and a short story AMBUSHED.  During 2012 I added another novel, DARK POWERS, and a short story, HOT AND DANGEROUS, all the while keeping up my “day job,” writing for Harlequin Intrigue, Sourcebooks, and Carina.

This month, I’ve put several of the above titles together into a DECORAH SECURITY COLLECTION that’s doing really well on Amazon.

Indie publishing is a wild ride with some big advantages and also some disadvantages.  Nobody tells you how long to make the book.  If you have an idea that will work better for a short story than a novel, you can go write and publish it. And nobody censors you.  If your bad guys tend to use the F word when they’re angry, they can sling the trash talk with the best of them.

Then there’s the book cover. Over the years, I’ve been disappointed by so many of the covers my publisher has provided for my books.  Now I get to pick the guy, the pose and the background.  It’s exactly MY vision of my story, which is more satisfying than you know.

And it doesn’t matter if romantic suspense is “in” or “out” or if an editor wants paranormal or not.  I can do it my way.

Of course, you don’t have the support of a big publishing company behind you.  You pay the  cover artist.  And you need to find a good editor and a copy editor---if you want your work to be as polished as possible, with no typos or pesky spelling mistakes.  Then you either learn how to put it up on Amazon and other sites, or you find someone to do it for you.  After that, nobody is going to push your book but you. You’ve got to stay active on social media and interact with fans.  Which is fun, since it keeps you connected with the world from your writing cave.

There are frustrations in the self-publishing business.   But the control over my work outweighs them.  Next up in the DECORAH SECURITY series is ON EDGE, a prequel telling  how Frank Decorah got to be the head of Decorah Security.

I’ve got a couple more projects on the drawing boards as well, which means there’s lots more work for me ahead.  And I hope a lot more reading fun for you.