Hello My Name Is . . .

Hello, my name is Lynn Reynolds. I'm new here, so I  hope you'll be nice to me!

I'm a writer, but then, who isn't these days? It's easy now to get a book published quickly or to become a "citizen journalist" (read "unpaid") on the World Wide Web.

Back when I started writing - you know, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and the Internet consisted of a couple of tin cans held together with string and the magic iPod was just a gleam in the eye of Steve the Great - back then, you had to really work at it to be a writer. You could spend years struggling to get a story published, decades even. And then when it was published in some tiny literary magazine, you got paid in "contributor's copies." These were piles of free copies of the mag that you could give out to your friends, family and random strangers. I still have some of those contributor's copies. Strangely, my landlord wouldn't accept them in lieu of cash for the rent. So I switched from an English major to a Business major, embraced the dark side, and got a real job.

I became a newspaper reporter.

See? I told you it was back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Now the Internet is rapidly rendering newspapers obsolete and jobs in the field are almost non-existent. The replacement jobs - writing for Internet content providers - pay almost as well as those literary magazines I started out with around three decades ago. I thought I'd make up the shortfall in income by writing a couple of novels. It takes a long time to write a good novel and it seemed logical to assume that such effort would be compensated accordingly. I didn't expect to become JK Rowling, but I did expect to pay my son's private school tuition.

Okay, all you published authors, out there! Pick yourselves up off the floor and stop laughing right now!

Needless to say - since my books do not involve sparkly teenaged vampires and their sullen girlfriends, I did not get rich off this endeavor. At this point, I think it's a fair bet to say that any profession I embrace is guaranteed to have REALLY LOW PAY as one of its top rewards. I gravitate to low pay enterprises like Snooki to a tanning booth.

But I did get some benefits from writing those novels. First, there was the enjoyment of seeing those fictional worlds come together. Second, I met a great group of new friends at various writing conferences and online through various writer's organizations like SinC and RWA. Last but not least, there's the satisfaction of finishing something and seeing it all the way through to the end.

Some days, I'm not sure whether I'll write another novel. My first, Thirty-Nine Again, is what I like to call a "chick noir" novel - a chick lit mystery. The second is Love Capri Style, a frothy, sexy romance set in Italy. I enjoy romance immensely, but I have a lot of other story ideas that aren't romances at all. Mysteries, young adult and even science fiction.I'm thinking of focusing on them in the future. But it takes a lot of time for me to write a novel - I'm not a fast worker. I'd hate for novels to also be obsolete by the time I finish the next one! Sometimes I think that might happen, since there are so many other ways to be entertained. Yes, ebooks are doing well these days, but the analysis seems to show that most of the people buying them are middle-aged. They're people who were already reading print books and now they've just shifted to reading their books in large type on a Kindle.

Even with the popularity of Harry Potter and Twilight, it's not clear that most young people are spending a lot of time or money on books. After all, they can read as much as they want online for free at any of a gazillion blogs and websites. I confess, even I don't read as many books as I used to. Who has time after reading all those blogs and tweets and Facebook updates??? And books can be so confusing when you're used to accessing things online!

What about you? Do you read a lot of books these days? Are they print books or ebooks? Or do you find yourself reading fewer books and watching talented cats on YouTube?

Lynn Reynolds is a writer, wife and mom - not necessarily in that order. She's a city girl trapped in Green Acres. Her secret ambition is to be a wench at the Renaissance Faire. RT Book Reviews called her "chick noir" suspense novel Thirty-Nine Again, "a first-class mystery and a first-class read."