Steven R Malikowski

My day job is helping doctors teach, at a medical school. My night job, and favorite job, has been writing stories based on real life challenges, since they bring out who people really are. Anybody can be nice when times are easy. It's when times are tough that the real person comes out. My current books are about my brother, and they show his calm reaction and laughs during tough times, which I love. I'm an independent author, which has been more work than I ever imagined, but it's also been my most satisfying work.

Here's a bit about why I write. As a kid, every family get-together had adults playing cards, while they competed with long stories and short retorts. The result was a lot of loud laughs, which us kids could hear from a nearby woods. As a student, I had a strange fascination with grammar and words. I wanted to learn what each punctuation mark meant and how to give each word meaning, usually by using fewer of them.

In recent years, it's more about pages than punctuation and words. Each page must earn and keep a reader's attention. Many successful writers describe their own way of working through this challenge. My way follows my other interests, like running marathons or cycling for a few hundred miles. Intense writing, running, and cycling all start with making time for them, each day. JK Rowling put it in a more colorful way, when she made a new year's resolution. She vowed to, "Guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg."

After a while, writing becomes a lifestyle. My favorite way to start a day is to have more coffee than I should and convert the caffeine into pages, many of which I actually use. I recently finished my first novel, following the maxim "write what you know." I know my brother, and I respect how he lives and laughs about a challenge that slows down many good people, living with blindness. Mike lost his sight due to bad luck, so my books about him are really about working through bad luck, sighted or not.

Of course, I hope my books are successful, but that success matters less than it used to. I'll still start my mornings trying to earn and keep some reader's attention. That usually involves long stories and short retorts, but hopefully, my written words will be as good as the ones that many of us have heard during a game of cards.