Who is an author/novelist here? How did you begin writing or what motivated you?

As my tagline says, I have 145 (and counting) professionally and traditionally published books. I began writing quite frankly because I was reading books that I thought were inferior to what I could produce, and because I had stories that were starting to feel as if they wanted to tear themselves out of me. What motivated me was pig-headed determination that those stories were going to see the light of day.