In Episode 19 of Lawyerpreneur, Lisa Lilly and I discuss her transition from full-time lawyer to having an author business as the primary source of her income. We also talk about how operating her own firm gave Lisa the confidence to know she could successfully run her indie author business.
You can listen here or on your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, TuneIn, and RSS.
Today’s show is sponsored by ALPS, the nation’s largest direct writer of lawyers’ malpractice insurance. Right now you can get 25% off one CLE seminar from ALPS. Go to alpsinsurance.com/cle and use promo code LAWYERPRENEUR upon check-out.
Slaying Briefs, Books, and Vampires with Lisa Lilly
Jeremy Richter: My guest today is Lisa M. Lilly, a best-selling author of suspense, thrillers, and supernatural novels, as well as nonfiction for writers. She’s also a lawyer and adjunct professor at DePaul College of Law, and she hosts the Buffy and the Art of Story podcast. Lisa, welcome to Lawyerpreneur.
Lisa Lilly: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Jeremy Richter: I’m really glad to have you on the show. And when I first became aware of you, I was at a conference in Denver in September of last year, when we used to still be able to go to conferences. And I was walking around like downtown Denver listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast, and you were the guest. And I just really enjoyed it. And I thought, you know, I really want to have a conversation with Lisa at some point.
Lisa Lilly: I’m so glad that you enjoyed that episode. It was really fun to record.
Jeremy Richter: Yeah. And so when I was did a deep dive on your blog to get ready for this interview, which is writingasasecondcareer.com. I went all the way back to the very first post in December of 2016. And you said some things in there that I think will really resonate. They resonated with me. I think they’ll resonate with the listeners too. And I want to ask you about some of that. And also, I think there was something in the air or in the water in 2016. That’s when I started my blog. One of my lawyer friends, Josh Holt, who blogs as the biglawinvestor.com, started his then. I know a handful of other people started in 2016. So I don’t know what was happening that year. But there were a lot of blogs that started.
Lisa Lilly: We all wanted to blog. Now we all want to podcast, right?
Jeremy Richter: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. All right. So one of the things you said was, “Most of my living has been made as a lawyer, one who usually has more work than I want and struggles to carve out time to write and for a personal life.” So at what point did you choose to prioritize the things that were personally important to you?
Lisa Lilly: Yeah, I feel like that was a choice I had to keep making. But probably the first time I made a bit of a turn was I had been practicing for about three years at a big law firm, and I felt established enough. I had clients who liked working with me. I had partners who were putting me on lots of cases. And I was at a firm that was somewhat open to flexible work arrangement. So I went in and said, Hey, I also write novels. And I really want to keep doing that. But it’s hard to fit that in and bill 2,100 hours a year. Is there a way of doing this where I could bill less and earn less? So they let me do it. I had to get sign off from all the partners. With mixed reviews on how well that works. And anyone who’s done that will tell you, often you end up working the same amount of hours and just getting paid less. But it did open up some space.
And then later on down the road was when I decided to open my own practice. And I had hit a point, really difficult personal time. My parents were with a tragic accident and they or crash they were hit by a drunk driver and did not survive. Although my dad did live for like six weeks. And everyone at the firm was amazing. And clients were amazing. People were so very kind. But when it came time to kind of go back to working full time, because I was still full time even though it was a reduced schedule, it just hit me.
I was on this case that was – it was just the worst case I have ever had in my practice in terms of stress. And I had to miss a Fourth of July celebration that meant a lot to me. My dad was a veteran. He always marched in our parade where I grew up. And I so wanted to go back and be there with my cousins and see the other veterans and go to their party, and I just could not go. I mean, it was nobody’s fault. But that was the nature of the case, of practice. And it hit me. I thought, Wait, this is not — every time these things happen, I say to myself, Oh, it’s an aberration. It won’t be like this all the time. And I finally realized the aberration was when I did have time, when I couldn’t take a few weeks where I wasn’t insanely stretched, and I could spend a couple hours writing and also maybe see one of my friends or see my family.
So I had been thinking already about what I wanted to do. Always in my mind was that I would like to have my own practice from before I started law school. So I finally sat down and kind of had a talk with myself and said, okay, how long am I going to keep saying, well, another couple years, another couple years at the big firm, I’ll learn a little more I didn’t and so I spent a year planning and I started my own practice and it was partly to have you know, have more control over my life, have more choice so that if I got so busy, I was unhappy, I could actually make a choice to work less, and there would be no one to say to me. Nope, sorry, that doesn’t fit with our agenda.
Jeremy Richter: Did that translate to reality for you when you made the leap?
Lisa Lilly: Really good question. That’s why I say it’s been ongoing. And of course, I read this much too late, later I read something about how people who leave and start their own businesses, because they want to do things differently, typically recreate what they left. And I sort of did that in a good way. Like it was a good problem to have to have too much work. But I was prepared for everything but too much work. And for the first few years, I was like, Oh, this is great. You have all this work. Other solos I know are scrambling for enough legal work to do.
But there came a time, and it probably took longer than it should have, for it to hit me that I had put myself almost in the same spot where I was working many more hours than I wanted. I was actually writing more at that point. I was publishing my own books, too. So I was probably proportionately I was spending a little more time writing. I did have a little more time for personal life. I had a wider network of friends, I saw family more, but it was still really intense. So that was when I made the biggest turn. And I literally wrote the word “no” in magic marker on a post-it and put it over my phone. So that if someone called and said, Hey, I want to refer you this case, I would say no, because my default was to say yes. And then just work more and more and more and more.
Jeremy Richter: Well, yeah, because we’re lawyers, and we’re risk averse. And we have this — well, I won’t project this on you — but I have this mindset that I try to steer away from that I can’t say no to this case because what if there aren’t any more cases after it. So “no” seems impossible.
Lisa Lilly: Yeah, that is exactly it no matter how I couldn’t — well, I’m sure probably all lawyers identify — no matter how busy you are, you can be simultaneously overwhelmed because you’re so busy and worried that three months from now or six months from now, you’ll have nothing and I really that’s –saying no was really hard. And so I did it gradually. I first started saying no to I would accept anything from current clients, but nothing because I was fortunate that the area I did had a lot of ongoing repeat business, but I would say no to anybody new. I just say, you know what, I’m fully engaged. I’m not taking any new clients and then I started saying no to current clients, if it wasn’t exactly in my area. And then eventually, maybe two years later, I actually made the decision to just wind up what I had, and focus on writing as my primary activity. And by that time I was teaching too, because I couldn’t just do one thing. Yeah, but it that was probably a three-year process of making that shift.
Jeremy Richter: That leads me to where I wanted to go next. Did having those multiple endeavors provide you with more fulfillment or a better balance than if you were just spending all of your energy on one pursuit?
Lisa Lilly: For me, it does. It does mean it is still a challenge sometimes to remember that I should leave a little time for just fun, you know, fun that is not work related in any way. Because for a lot of years, my fun was to write my novels. I would go on vacation and it would be a writing retreat to just write and interact with other writers and learn, and that was great. But that is kind of the danger of multiple things to do. But I do prefer that because I like the different — I like interacting and meeting different people. Teaching allows me to do that.
When now the small amount of law practice — I’m of counsel for another firm, and I work remotely with them, even when it’s not COVID times, remotely. So I really like having that mix of, you know, I teach and these are people starting out and they’re excited about law, and they’re excited about everything. And then some amount of law where I use those legal skills and occasionally go into court and write briefs, and then a lot of time writing fiction. It all kind of engages different parts of what I like to do and where I think my skills are.
And then I just added podcasting, which has been a big learning experience and has been fun and that goes to that. I’m not in court that much anymore. And I do enjoy that sort of presenting and speaking. So yeah, I do like having that mix. It makes it more challenging to schedule my time and really focus on what project, make sure that I get things done and get things out and don’t just dabble in everything. But it does help me feel happier, and ironically I guess for some people, it’s less stressful that way to me to be able to shift and not just have one thing that everything is riding on or it’s all that I do.
Jeremy Richter: So as you transitioned toward the second career of writing being your primary source of income and primary place of spending your time, were there parts of being a lawyer that were helpful? Or where was your experience as a lawyer and your skills that you had — was there any of that that held you back? How did that translate to the new business?
Lisa Lilly: Yeah, I think there was there was both certainly a lot of skills as a lawyer, my practice was very writing intensive. So it’s a different kind of writing, but the idea of deadlines, you have to turn things out so it was very natural to me to say, Okay, I want to finish my first draft in a month. This is how many words I have to write a day and as a lawyer, most of us, if we bill by the hour, which for the most part I did, we’re very used to really knowing where we’re spending our time. So I was used to–
Jeremy Richter: Every six minutes of it.
Lisa Lilly: Every six minutes. Yeah, can I bill someone for reading this magazine? But yeah, and I think there is a real plus there because it makes you conscious of how much you can get done in a short time and also of really choosing. I have friends who say how can you go on Facebook and not just get down a rabbit hole? And I thought, Well, yeah, it’s from years of billing. Eight and a half hours a day plus doing form committees, plus writing my novel. There’s no you don’t do that and go down the Facebook rabbit hole because then you either don’t sleep. I think it helps make you more focused.
But the thing that probably held me back was shifting from the time model to the project model. While of course I always had projects, I had deadlines, thinking of how productive I was based on time was something I feel like I have had to struggle to shift away from because I would schedule X amount of hours to work on my novel. But it took me a lot of years to seriously say no, I need to get X amount of pages done. If I want to publish by this date, I would often move — I was great at first drafts, but after that, the revising process, I would just be like, well, it’ll take however long it takes because I didn’t want to push myself the way I had in my law practice and get burnt out. But I realized I was thinking too much about, well, I spent three hours a day revising. So check, you know, did that rather than Yeah, but I only revised two scenes. I needed to move on. I needed to like say no, I’m going to revise X amount of ages. I was really giving myself a mental goldstar for the work versus, did I get this revision finished? So that’s been that has been a challenge. It was something I didn’t even realize I was doing. I forget whose podcast I listened to who talked about that with productivity, and it finally hit home. Okay, yes, stop thinking about hours spent that really is irrelevant, other than I’d like to spend less, so I have more time to do it.
Jeremy Richter: Were there any practical things that you implemented to help you make that transition?
Lisa Lilly: I had always done scheduling for myself, but I had not really sat down and broken down the process of well, not how long does it take me to revise, but if I’m going to publish, let me go backwards from the publication date, and figure out by when do I have to have this done and then break down those stages and really allocate specific times for that.
And I have to be flexible. Because if it’s a busy week teaching or a student really needs help or something like that, I can still move some deadlines around. But it helped me a lot to both put a timeframe on whenever we get something done. And to really think about why I was doing a project. Was that the most important project to me right then and what was my end goal with it? Is it to have another book in the series? Is it because I’ve got a podcast episode coming out about it? Is it you know, really think about what is the point of doing this? And that was that kind of pushed me to really look closely at how much time I spent and be more efficient with my time.
Jeremy Richter: So I think in the last four months or so all of us have had to discover how flexible we are or not. I imagine that was probably true with you. I expect you had to figure out how to teach a course virtually mid-semester last year?
Lisa Lilly: Yeah, it was our last four weeks, we shifted online and had no — adjunct professors don’t get a ton of resources or training or anything. Although my, my sort of team leader is really great and very helpful. So I yeah, part of it was since I’d started the podcast, I did those last four classes by audio. I would record audio sections, put them up for the students to listen to, and then we would do an online just typing in stuff for them, because I had never used Zoom at that point. And it seems like we were just talking about this before we started. There’s only so many things you can learn and do. And so I just said, This is what I can do. And the students told me that they liked it because everyone else was doing Zoom. It was kind of an overloaded platform at the moment and they enjoyed the switch where they could listen to the audio. And they felt it was a little more relaxed. And then they could go and comment and we’d have this discussion. Now this coming semester, I think I’m really I’m going to have to get more efficient with running a group on Zoom; I don’t see doing the whole semester that way.
Jeremy Richter: So in 2011, you gave an interview that I’m not going to ask you to remember because that was nine years ago. But I want to quote yourself to you and then ask you some questions because I liked what you said there. Alright, so you said — well, you were talking about the decision to start your own firm. And I think there are a lot of lawyers out there who will have a spark of recognition when they hear this. So you said, “I opened my own law firm because I decided rather than working so hard for the large firm, I practice that and pitching myself to the partners to convince them to promote me, I ought to work hard for myself and pitch directly to my clients. I’ve been very happy with that decision. I like being my own boss, and I’m better able to balance my writing and law practice.” How has that control, which I can totally identify with, and flexibility of being your own boss benefited everything else?
Lisa Lilly: It gives me more choice in what I do. And I’m happier with that. So even now, if there is a law project that’s really interesting to me, I can spend the time on it when it came to writing that really influenced my decision to publish my work myself and for my own small press, because I went through the same thought process as well, I really liked running my own practice and going kind of directly to the clients. I mean, I already had relationships but being able to work directly with them and shape my practice.
And I thought of writing that way, being able to put my work directly out there to readers rather than going through gatekeepers, and letting someone else tell me what I could publish and what I couldn’t and what I should be writing and how fast and when. So I feel like having started my own practice really gave me the confidence to do that. And it showed me that I do like running a business. You wear a lot of hats with it, which can be frustrating sometimes, but I also like it I like to look at the books and see where I am. I like to look down the road and know what’s going on rather than being surprised when my boss tells me.
Jeremy Richter: I can identify with that. My first book published through the American Bar Association. And they had control. And it was a good relationship, everything went fine. But they had ultimate control over the title, over the cover, the content, the pricing. And I after going through that process, I realized that was fine. But I want to have control over these things. I want to manage them. I’m willing to put in the time and the energy and the effort to build up the knowledge base to be able to do this on my own. And so I can really identify with what you’re saying there that writing is interesting and good, but also running your own business and being the one who realizes the profits from that and putting in the work is just really fulfilling.
Lisa Lilly: I think most writers — and before I decided I talked with a number of different I didn’t know anyone self-published, but I knew authors who were published traditionally, and I talked with them and they would talk about those frustrations. Like you said, they didn’t have control over the cover, or they had to do pretty much all the marketing and publicity themselves, unless you were with a giant press who really threw a lot behind you. But most authors I’ve met were with smaller presses. So there was a limited amount that the publisher did for them. And they said, yeah, we are doing all the legwork. And we’re happy to do that. But we’re limited in our tools.
You know, I put my Awakening series right now, the first book is a free ebook edition. And that drives a lot of sales to the rest of the series. I’ve seen a difference when I have it free versus when I charge for it. And I make more when it’s free, which is counterintuitive. If you’re from the traditional publishing model, I know authors who say yeah, I wish I could do that. They can’t even see what their sales are from not even month to month, let alone day to day to see if a particular thing they did increased their sales. So they’re really flying blind on whether their marketing efforts, are they making a difference? Where when you can see everything and control everything, you can see and decide, oh, that thing wasn’t worth doing or that ad wasn’t worth running. And this one was.
Jeremy Richter: So I’ve done interviews for the podcast with Robert Dugoni, who writes thrillers, and with Brian Cuban, who’s a speaker and a writer. And they both have their own businesses. And they’ve both said that if you want to be successful in your business pursuits outside of a law practice, you have to put in the same hard work and determination that you put into your law career. What does that look like for you as a daily practice in your writing?
Lisa Lilly: For me that that means it starts out on a bigger picture, much like I did with my law practice. Every quarter, I would try to sit down and say, Okay, what are my goals this quarter. I would do it for the year, but I would look at it quarterly. And then compare that to what I was doing day to day. And I do the same thing with my writing. I have quarterly goals. So when I sit down and plan my week, I take out that list and say, okay, where am I on that list? And what do I need to do this week that will move me toward those goals?
It took me a while to realize to run it as a business to their point, which I think is a good one, that I needed to do it that way. I was always good at getting the words written. But a lot of the time, everything else was sort of like throwing spaghetti at the wall and just kind of well, I’ll try this. I’ll try that. When I really started looking at it more significantly as this is my main business, that was the biggest difference. I really would looked at Okay, what goal am I trying to advance by doing this? Is this a priority goal? Or is this a maybe sometime I’d like to do that? And if so, let me do the priority ones first and do the things that I think will have the most effect. And I have to enjoy them too, obviously. But it really helped to start thinking of it that way, the same way I had with my practice.
Jeremy Richter: I like that. We’ve talked about your podcast, or we’ve mentioned your podcast a couple times. You’ve turned the first season of the podcast into a book, which I think is really interesting, because this podcast was a book idea long before it was a podcast idea. I wanted to write about lawyers who were doing interesting, innovative things, whether it was within their own practices, or outside of law practice altogether, and then there’s a whole spectrum in the middle. And so I knew that I was going to require interviewing a lot of people. And as an introvert, that’s not something that I’m just super inclined to just reach out to people. So having the podcast and having deadlines was a way to force myself into that.
Did you find it easy to transition all the words that you were generating through the podcast into a book that was able to help you tell that narrative and communicate that information?
Lisa Lilly: It was harder than I thought it would be. Funny, it was probably an easier process than writing sort of starting from zero. And the book idea came about almost by accident. I put something up on my Facebook page saying, hey, my podcast started back, Buffy and the Art of Story. And one of my friends from law school, who’s a huge Buffy fan wrote, Oh, I can’t wait to buy that book, because he just assumed it was a book because he knew I was a writer. And I thought, Oh, that’s a good idea.
So then what I did was use — I use Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate sometimes to write and you can also transcribe recordings. So the transcripts come from that, but they need a lot of editing more than I thought it would take. And in some ways, it is a little tedious because you’ve already — it isn’t the same exciting creation process. But it was interesting doing it, and I feel like I learned a lot by putting that first season into the book. I learned a lot that also helped me as I went forward with the next season of the podcast. And now that I’m working on that, I can see that, oh, I made some good changes based on that. I did have to edit more than I thought because it’s like a deposition transcript, right? You see it on paper and you say, huh, that was not very articulate.
Jeremy Richter: There was one time. I mean, I look at most of my deposition transcripts. Sometimes, you know, just flinching the whole time. And there’s one court reporter who I think she must have hated me. Because she included every time I said, Okay, which I think was at the beginning of almost every question she put in there. Because most of them take that out, you know, especially if it’s people you know, really well. But she did not. She included all of them in it. I counted. It was a lot.
Lisa Lilly: But it’s good feedback in a way. But yes, I did have a court reporter friend who told me, confirmed what you just said. She said, Well, if I really liked the lawyer, I’ll edit out but if I don’t, I leave them all in.
Jeremy Richter: So I transcribe — or I don’t transcribe all these, I have this an A.I. bot that transcribes all the podcasts. And then I have to edit it just like you talked about with the Dragon software. And it takes, I mean, like two hours for every 45 minutes of editing and making it tight here. And I wouldn’t have anticipated that. But it’s also like you said, it’s the same experience.
And realizing I say like too much and you know, and right, and you’re like, Okay, and well see I just did it. And now I’m really cognizant of trying to think and improve.
And so these processes that we’re doing for things like for me that are unrelated to my law practice, particularly, still have an effect on my law practice, because it’s hopefully improving my oratory skills or my presentation skills and communications with clients or whoever. When you were doing both of these things simultaneously, did you see that relationship where improvement in your writing area also translated to improvements and changes in your practice?
Lisa Lilly: Yeah, I definitely found that both endeavors complement each other. And the writing, I wrote fiction before I ever thought about going to law school. And on that note, I had clients — so even as a new lawyer, I was very comfortable writing and I had clients who would find out that I wrote fiction and say, Oh, that makes so much sense because, you know, maybe it was yours was the first brief that I didn’t have to edit. Or they would say, you have a much more, not quite conversational style, because a lot of my writing was like appellate writing, but easier to read. They’d say, Oh, it’s so much easier to read. It’s so much more engaging and most of my stuff was insurance-related class actions. So if you can make that engaging, I mean, that is a real challenge and very technical. So it was nice to know that they, they would quite often say, Oh, yeah, of course you are, you know, that’s great.
But like you said other things to the presentation, the fact that I had read my words in depositions, and worked deliberately on not doing the likes, and you knows as much we all do it, but I think that helped me when I taught. Presenting in court helped me. I too am more of an introvert. Despite that, I really like presenting and getting up on the stage. When I go to writers’ conference, for instance, my instinct is just to sit back there with my notepad and not talk to anybody. And I would really have to draw on my legal training and think of it’s just like a court, you need to go up and Introduce yourself. Go say hello. Go say, Hey, we have emailed, I’m so and so. And it helped to just — I had to kind of reframe it, because I really did feel more confident in the legal arena for quite a long time. And so kind of borrowing from that was very helpful to me.
Jeremy Richter: I think it’s funny that you mentioned writing style and voice because my writing style for my blog and my books is very conversational. Somebody even called it irreverent, which I’m not sure what that means, but I chose to take it as a compliment. But I see that when I’m writing, like briefs or memos to clients of like this is far less overwritten that it might have been a few years ago, and it sounds more like me, as I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of words figuring out how I write and how I communicate.
Lisa Lilly: Yeah, I think when we’re new lawyers especially, there’s that struggle to master the sort of the form of legal writing and the map that you should follow and which words to use. It takes a while to have that style of your own that works and yet is unique. And I feel like the more you write, even if it’s totally unrelated things, the more you are developing that style.
I have had to be careful. Sometimes the legal side creeps into the fiction, and I have to edit it out. I had a line of dialogue. It was years and years ago, but my writer’s group — I had a character said something like “arguably,” and the character was not a lawyer. And writer’s group said, okay, nobody says that. I’m like, What do you mean? Everyone I know says that.
Jeremy Richter: I understand. In an interview you did several years ago — let me let me preface this. One of the things I wrote about in my most recent book was about fear of failure and coping with that. And so in an interview you gave a few years ago, you said that sometimes you fear that what you write won’t be any good. And so with a decade of writing, and dozens of books under your belt, is that a fear that you still experience? And if so, how do you cope with that?
Lisa Lilly: There is always a stage in the process of whatever I’m writing, where I have that feeling. And that fear isn’t as often are as strong as it used to be. But there’s always that point, and it could be in the first draft where I just don’t know. I thought I knew I was where I was going, and I don’t. Or I’m reading back my first draft, and I’m thinking — I’m doing that right now — I’m hitting mine and I hit this point. I’m like, Oh, this is deadly dull. There’s nothing happening here. I thought this was so exciting when I wrote it.
There is that fear that I won’t be able to figure out how to fix this, that the whole idea just isn’t working. And I have spent three months writing it on and off, but the way I deal with it, and I feel like this helps, the more you do it is to say, Okay, I remember I have felt this way before, and I figured it out, I will figure it out. And the other way is having a greater sense of that it is okay if it takes another draft, but it’s also okay, if I finish it. And I think it’s great.
There’s going to be some readers who don’t — there’ll be some who love it and will be some who say this book is not for me. And that’s alright, because maybe one of my other books will be for them. Or maybe the next book will be for them, as long as I can get it to where I think it’s the best it can be. But I feel like the bigger thing is just accepting that at some stage of the process, it probably isn’t very good. That’s what revising is for. And I’m more comfortable that, in that process, I will figure out a way to make it better.
Jeremy Richter: I was listening to a podcast this morning, where the writer said he quit his day job. He had a young family with no real savings, but just confidence that he was going to be able to work it out. Your transition to writing as your primary career was not so abrupt. You had a transition time. Did having the career in your law practice and having that transition over a couple of years, put less pressure on you to have the writing be immediately financially successful, and a significant source of income and was that helpful as you transitioned?
Lisa Lilly: It definitely was helpful. And there are pluses and minuses to that. The minus is when I chose what to write, I wasn’t always focused on what would make sense in terms of the market or financially. Sure if I had been, I had that supernatural thriller series. I still get new readers in it now even though I published the first book in it in 2011. The thing to do really, if I just wanted to focus on the market and what makes sense financially would have been to do another supernatural thriller series, not switch over to female private-I novels. Because I thought more readers might carry over, but for the most part, there’s a little crossover in that audience, but not a lot because some people just never read supernatural. Some people don’t want to read just plain mysteries.
But the plus is I’ve been able to write things I love to write. And I do think about the market. I do think about business. But in the long run, my thought is always, well if I’m not going to write what I love to write, I can just go and do more law because I like that writing too. And that’s for sure payment. That’s a pretty — I will make more at that, at least in the short run, right? It’s a short term, generally speaking, but the clients pay.
Jeremy Richter: You’re immediately trading your time for money for money.
Lisa Lilly: But then that’s the thing. You’re trading your time for money, and you never get out of that. But really, if I were just going to choose what I wrote based totally on the market and was going to try to write something I wasn’t that engaged with anymore, I would rather do law. I like law, I enjoy it. So law has given me that freedom to say okay, there is a universe of things I like to write, and sure of the ones I like to write. I’ll try to look at the market and look at business. But I don’t have to go to the extreme with that. If I really love and you know my new series, I’m on the fourth book now, and it’s only starting to kind of take hold, but I could do that because I could think long term and think yes but that’s what I really want to be doing right now. And that meant more to me. And I feel really fortunate you know that I had a career, really two careers I enjoy. And I’ve been able to balance them out and decide to some extent like veer towards what I really enjoy doing. It’s a long process getting here.
Jeremy Richter: It’s only taken like 10 years, right?
Lisa Lilly: You know, but I liked a lot on the way too. There were great things and continue to be practicing law and also lots of great life experience to while doing it.
Jeremy Richter: Well, we’re about out of time, but I want people to know where they can find you and follow you and read your work.
Lisa Lilly: So you can find all my books at lisalilly.com. And my articles on writing and marketing and business for authors are writingasasecondcareer.com. And my podcast “Buffy and the Art of Story,” you would find that on Lisalilly.com. Also on Twitter at @lisamlilly.
Jeremy Richter: All right. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed it.
Lisa Lilly: Thank you. It was great talking with you.
