Welcome to Waterman Words, where writing matters.

All of us start our journey as writers in different ways.

Some of us start as kids, scrawling stories and poems in scuffed notebooks.  Others don't discover the writing life until college, under the guidance of the greats.  And then there are those who only find the time to write once their children have flown the nest and the quiet hours need filling.

As for myself, I started my journey as a writer more than a decade ago, sitting over coffee with my girlfriend Jen.

Jennifer taught me that being a writer was a choice.  All it took was the courage to tell people, "I am a writer."  You didn't have to be published to be a writer, she told me.  You just had to write.

It was she who convinced me that being a writer allowed you to be “flaky.” Writers could justify international travel, sitting for hours in cafes people-watching, and working mundane jobs that allowed them to subsist while pursuing their creative passions.

Her description of the writing life was enough for me. I graduated from university with a plan: to travel the world, work on farms, and write about the people and places I discovered.

Ten years later, I have five books under my belt, with another five co-authored by me. But they’re not about traveling or meeting people or having adventures. They’re self-help books about dating and relationships, certainly not the type of books I thought I’d have published by this stage in my life.

Oh, and that’s the other catch. They’re actually not “published” in the traditional sense of the term. They’re online instead. I still have a publisher – the parent company of the 000Relationships Network and Meet Your Sweet – but publishing involves graphic designing the manuscript, generating a PDF, and uploading it to the internet.

I’m at the wave of a new kind of author. We don’t have agents, contracts, or book signings. We don’t need to submit our manuscript to all the major publishers and experience rejection over and over again. Instead, we simply write about what we know, in the simplest language possible, and generate a PDF from our Word documents. No stress, no mess.

This website is about what I’ve learned in the past decade of attempting to become a writer. Or, as Jennifer said, I always was a writer, because being a writer is a decision about one’s identity. A writer is someone who writes, simple as that.

Becoming a published writer is a little more complicated, and that’s why this website exists: to help others along the journey to writing excellence. We all want an audience; we want people to read the words we have written. But to do that, we have to know a few things about good writing, a few things about ourselves and our abilities, and a few things about the publishing industry.

Thanks for joining me!