I've devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don't have to depend on writing fiction for my income.

When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.

During that first year, I felt guilty that my wife was out working bringing in all our income, while I was at home playing on the computer, so I made myself treat writing like a job.

When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.