I’ve been writing off and on since college. Mostly off, but it has always been something I enjoyed getting back to. Now I’m 44 and am nearing completion of my first book.

So does this make me an author, or a writer?

My guess is that until published you are a writer. That is your descriptor, it’s what you do when you have time, you write. But to say you are an author seems to say “I’m published” or “People can buy my book.”

Then you have writers who write but don’t write books. They write articles for magazines and papers, are they authors or does author mean you have written a larger body of work?

These are things I think about when I can’t think about the next sentence to write, which is happening right now.

I wonder if that happens to authors.