One thing leads to another. Meeting so-and-so led to this-and-that, this-and-that led to meeting whats-his-name. That’s the basic gist behind the domino effect. Prominent in my life, it’s a phenomenon that I wholeheartedly believe in.

The most recent run of dominoes is very exciting.

Losing my TV job to downsizing was the first domino. Diving wholeheartedly into the antiques biz to supplement the unemployment checks was the next domino. That experience led to writing the ebook Selling in an Antique Mall. Researching how-to create and sell an ebook led to stumbling onto the indie author industry that, thanks to technology, is just exploding.

Oh my god, people! Indie authors are actually earning a decent living. Holy smokes! I gotta get in on this. I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller ala Joss Whedon – that’s why I went into TV in the first place. Too bad I wound up producing mostly news promos on disturbing sh!t like the Columbine shooting.

Oh my god, people! Here’s a chance to really live my dream. I grabbed that domino with two fists and wandered off to a corner to write a young adult novel.*

Exciting stuff, no? And I got here by losing my job.

Now, A Lovely Thing is a do-it-yourself kind of blog, and I’m a do-it-yourself kind of person. So, I’m not going to proclaim that something magical puts the bones** in place.

Yes, some of dominos in our lives are placed by other people. Most dominos, though, we put in place ourselves. The job-layoff domino was put there by some guy at big-TV-company headquarters, but that antique mall domino was all me.

Recognizing that that biz experience was worthy of a book was all me, too, so was researching and the aforementioned stumbling.

The indie market domino was placed by other people – many other people, both writers and techie people at Amazon. Writing the novel was my domino.

You get the idea.

I’m going to place more dominos in the form of writing more books.

Expect a blow-by-blow feature on A Lovely Thing on a regular basis. Once the book is up for sale, I’ll even post numbers of sales and profit, and probably have a few cries when the dominos go askew

How are the dominos falling in your life? Do share!

*It’s under a pen name and will be published this fall. I may or may not share my alter ego here in the future.

**bones is slang for dominos