I love certain TV shows so much that knowing a new episode is going to air that night will make me happy all day. If I had the time, I’d see a movie every day of my life. I’m a fan of Cardinals baseball and try to be at the ballpark on opening day. I read as often as I can, across all genres, though I’m most often holding a book that’s fantasy or romance, with the occasional western thrown in. But I do manage to tear myself away from the computer now and then to do something fun.

It requires a pretty obsessive-compulsive personality to be as prolific as I’ve been in the past ten years and hold down a full-time job. I mostly write my fiction in the evenings and on weekends. Now I write about management education and interview some really cool, really smart people from all over the world.

Many people don’t know this, but I’m a CPF (Certified Picture Framer), having passed a very long, technical test to prove I understood the tenets of conservation framing. My longest stint, seventeen years, was at DECOR. I’ve spent most of my journalism career at three trade and association magazines-The Professional Photographer (which, as you might guess, went to studio and industrial photographers), DECOR (which went to frame shop and art gallery owners), and BizEd (which is directed at deans and professors at business schools). It occurred to me early on that it might take some time and a lot of tries before I was able to publish any of my creative writing, so I pursued a degree in journalism at Northwestern University so I’d be able to support myself while I figured out how to write fiction. My first poem was about Halloween: 'What is tonight? What is tonight?/Try to guess and you’ll guess right.' Perhaps this inauspicious beginning explains why it took me till I was in my thirties to sell a novel. I’ve been writing stories and poems since I was eight years old.

Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn