Lynn Abbey
You usually don't get the copyright or reprint rights in a shared-world or work-for-hire situation, so your ability to make additional money off your work is limited.
Writing genre fantasy requires a few more research twists, most of them involving magic. By the time I start the first draft, whatever magic system I've built is meant to seem fundamental to the world I've created, but it's really an afterthought.
Whenever I encounter an article that makes my ears wiggle, I give it a number, write a summary for my database and put the article in a file cabinet. Searching the database is faster and easier than trying to have a fancy filing system.
When I'm writing my own material, I've full control over creation and evolution, vertical and horizontal, the whole nine yards. It's the most satisfying type of writing, and also the most difficult because while all the triumphs are mine, so are all the mistakes.
When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
When I started out, I thought being a writer was all about writing. Writing is important, but the business of a writer is publishing and the realities of publishing can be very limiting, even unpleasant.
When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.
When done well, the shared universes are richer than their single-creator counterparts.
Were I to decide that I didn't want to be a genre writer, or that I wanted to switch genres, I'd be looking at starting over.
We've had a few inquiries from companies and individuals looking to develop an interactive, web-based game but, to date, none of them have progressed to the contract and license stage.
We're out to prove the naysayers wrong. Maybe a shared-world anthology can't hit the bestseller lists in this day and age, but one, at least, is going to survive.
To feel free enough to write at all, I have to give my research a twist that allows me to say, Okay, this is NOT 12th century France.
Time really can heal wounds. By the mid-90s, when I realized that I was signing books that were older than the readers offering them to me, I began to reconsider my position.
Thieves' World is otherwise known as the project that ate my life in the '80s.
There's a lot of hearsay and worse out on the Internet and, though I write fiction, I like to think that my background information is solid.
There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.
The quality of editing in the work-for-hire world is generally a few notches below what you'd find elsewhere, and I've had a few run-ins with editors who thought they were really collaborators. That can be very annoying.
The most annoying risk that I find associated with work-for-hire situations is somebody's always trying to move the goal posts. It's a good idea to nail those suckers down before I start the first draft.
The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.
The books I've written for gaming companies are a like games of miniature golf where the object is to weave an interesting story through an obstacle course.