My Writing and I

MY WRITING AND I: AN ODYSSEY OF SWITCHING CAREERS AND BECOMING A WRITER is a first person account of how the author Jack Wiley made a career switch in 1972 at 35 years of age that stunned his friends. Four years after earning a PhD, he quit his position as a research physiologist and became a writer. This was not an easy decision. His idea (or was it a dream?) was to make his living as a writer and to live aboard and do cruising in his sailboat, Sea Puppy. He was fed up being tied down in laboratories and classrooms and wanted a life of freedom and adventure. He wanted to go off on his own so that he could do his own thinking. However, he was by no means certain that he could make enough money from writing to support himself. He justified the decision with the idea that if the writing did not work out, He could always return to teaching and research. With not much money in the bank and two book contracts with piddling advances, he set sail to make this dream a reality. Fortunately, he owned Sea Puppy, and living aboard gave him an inexpensive place to live while he faced the challenge of making enough money to live on from his writing. This book is the story of what led up to this turning point in his life and the uncharted course his life took after that. It includes doing adventurous things that he wanted to do anyway so that he could write books about them, publishing with traditional publisher, moving on to self-publishing and starting his own one-person publishing company where he did on-demand publishing, and finally self-publishing with Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace. For forty-four years from 1972 to the time of writing of this book in 2016, he has made his living entirely from his writing. He is the author of more than fifty books.