I’m John Walters, and I need more time to reflect and write. I want to write my stories and memoirs full-time for the rest of my life, and I need your help.
I’m a full-time freelance writer, but because income from book royalties and short story sales is erratic, most of my time is taken up in researching and writing articles for which I get paid more promptly than for fiction. My fiction and memoir writing is then relegated to the late night hours when I’ve already put in about ten hours of writing other people’s blog posts. I often wonder how much more I could accomplish if I put my full energy during those peak hours into writing my own work.
Despite the strictures on my time and energy, I’ve managed to produce seven novels, the last of which is in the final prepublication stages. My published science fiction and fantasy novels include Love Children, After the Fireflood, and Caliban’s Children. Additionally, The One Thousand Omnibus is a collection of four science fiction novellas featuring aliens teaming up with hippies to save the world. I’ve also written two mainstream novels about the hippy era of the late sixties and early seventies, The Misadventures of Mama Kitchen and Sunflower, as well as a noir thriller called The Fantasy Book Murders.
Short stories are perhaps my first literary love. I love reading them and I love writing them. I’ve published over seventy short stories, and my seventh collection, Invasive Procedures, was recently released.
When I was in my early twenties back in the mid-1970s, I set out on the road to find my voice as a writer. I ended up staying overseas and didn’t return to the States for thirty-five years. These adventures gave rise to my memoirs. World Without Pain: The Story of a Search tells of my experiences on the road as a hippy traveler. I write about my many years traveling and raising a family in southern Europe in After the Rosy-Fingered Dawn: A Memoir of Greece. When I finally returned to the country of my birth in 2012, I experienced great culture shock, the subject of my memoir America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad. I’ve also written about my struggles as a writer in Writing as a Metaphysical Experience.
My initial goal of $1,000 per month will by no means cover all my expenses. Rents are expensive here in Seattle, and I’m also a single parent. What it will do, however, is free me from some of the hackwork article writing drudgery so that I can follow a schedule that allows me to devote some of my best hours to writing my prime work: the fiction and memoirs. If I meet this first goal, I may set another that will set me completely free from the hack writing. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to hit the road again, at least part time, and thrill you with reports of wonders in exotic and mysterious lands.
Month by month, as we take this journey together, I plan to post short stories, excerpts from my memoirs, project updates, and other literary treasures to edify, entertain, and delight you.
Once again, here’s the link: John Walters Creates Fiction and Memoirs. If you want to help support me in my fiction and memoir writing, it’s very easy to set up an account and become a patron of the arts.