When I was a teenager, I announced that I wanted to be a writer. This was in the 1980s, when many parents pushed their children to become businesspeople, doctors, or lawyers. Upon hearing my plans, my parents told me, “That’s not realistic. Saying you want to be writer is like saying you want to be a movie star or an astronaut, or that you want to play football in the NFL. The odds are overwhelmingly against you, so you need to find a career that will let you pay the bills and raise a family. You should be a teacher.”

So I earned a college degree in English secondary education, knowing in the back of my mind that I didn’t want to teach kids to write—I wanted to do the writing. In high school I wrote for my school’s literary magazine, then in college I was a columnist for the university newspaper. Seeing my name in the bylines never got old; it gave me a sense of validation and elation that I wanted to continue experiencing. Yet my parents’ lack of faith in writing as a career choice loomed in my mind, and so I began teaching.

Two years later, I’d had enough of the classroom. My parents’ advice was not working out for me, so I began looking into publishing, and I quickly found full-time employment. What did that job entail? Proofreading phone books. That’s right, I’d walked away from a respected career and a pension so I could spend eight hours a day reading phone numbers in six-point type. It wasn’t long before I began to wonder if perhaps I’d been too quick to dismiss my family’s wisdom, but then something wonderful happened: I sold a short story to Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise. Then I sold articles to Paramount’s Star Trek magazines, and soon thereafter I’d sold my first comic book work as well.

All of that took place in the early to mid-1990s. By the time the 20th century concluded, I was working as a magazine editor, writing freelance articles and essays on the side. A decade later, my first book hit stores, and since then that one book has turned into more than 160 with my name in them, either as writer or editor. I know my parents meant well, and that they wanted only the best for me… but I am so glad I ignored them.