About Monica Leonelle | About The World Needs Your Passion | About Lovelight Lioness Productions | About Writer MBA | About Solo Storm | About LEGOs
About Monica Leonelle
I’m an MBA and former software engineer, so I love to jam out on building businesses on the internet. I’ve built several, including a fiction business, a professional training company, a spirituality company, and a handful of others that have since been shut down.
If I could ever stop creating companies, I think my dream job might be to be a UPS delivery gal. Have you ever seen a UPS worker looking sad? They get to work by themselves and hopefully listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks all day.
My husband is also like me, an entrepreneur. We’re both extremely multi-passionate and he also started his career as a software engineer. I believe the couple that slays together, stays together. You can catch us Onewheeling (electric skateboarding!) to various coffee shops all over St. Louis, where we live.
I spend a lot of time momming the cutest toddler in the world. I’m a huge advocate for protecting children’s privacy on the internet, so I won’t post too many pictures of the little guy, but I will try to sneak a few in here!
Monica Leonelle is my name, but I also write under several pen names, including Monica Grace (spirituality) and Solo Storm (fantasy and sci-fi).
About The World Needs Your Passion
The World Needs Your Passion is the anthem of my life. It’s something I believe to the core of my being, and something I have tested over and over again in my reality.
Call me a dreamer, but I think passion is the answer to many problems in this world. When more people are aligned to a life that ignites them and honors who they truly are, good things happen. They share cool work with the world, they donate to causes that matter to them, they organize and pitch in to help each other, they live in community, and they work to create a net positive in the world.
This website is about embodying the idea of living your passions out loud, and it is also about connecting those passions with practical and limited resources—like time, energy, and money. Business and entrepreneurship are important skills when it comes to deepening the time and energy you spend on your passions, because it all must be funded, as must your life.
About Lovelight Lioness Productions
This is my production company that runs all of my projects right now. I’m currently focused on publishing, but in the future I could see myself tackling a television project. Right now, though, I’m still very happy building my book catalog, and I’ve never tried writing a script…So it may not be in the cards, and that’s okay too! The name is a portmanteau plus the English word for my name, “Leonelle.”
About Writer MBA
Writer MBA is a training company for the publishing industry that teaches and mentors authors on sales, marketing, and business principles to help them sell more books. The company hosts the Future of Publishing Mastermind, a yearly in-person conference in New Orleans, LA, and runs a membership with access to its 3 premiere programs: Kickstarter Accelerator, Direct Sales Accelerator, and Go Wide, Grow Wide. It is owned by USA Today bestselling authors and publishing influencers Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohelty.
We started Writer MBA on accident. Russell basically gave me his previous company, the Complete Creative, and then we were surprised that it actually turned into something with our meta Kickstarter launch of one of our co-authored books, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter.
That campaign hit $21k and we ended up building a course around the topic, which we ended up rolling into a Writer MBA membership. Our long-term mission is to show authors that it’s possible and profitable to make money by being wide on all retailers, and that they can gain even more by going direct-to-readers through three key pillars—websites (storefronts and landing pages), crowdfunding (launches and subscriptions/memberships), and live events and signings. These are all areas we’ve been working in for years, and we have so much to share!
About Solo Storm
I write romantic fantasy (romantasy) and sci-fi (romansci-fi?) with royalty as main characters (mostly princesses).
I grew up on major franchises like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, and the Chronicles of Narnia. Other favorites of mine include Avatar, The Hunger Games, Twilight, The Mortal Instruments, The Vampire Diaries, The Witcher, Westworld, Game of Thrones (aside from that ending!) and so many more.
I also read a ton of romance and have another pen name that writes contemporary romance. I’m a huge Jane Austen fan. And while fantasy is very much my first and greatest love, shows like Bridgerton, Emily in Paris, Downton Abbey, Victoria, The Crown, Reign, Gossip Girl, and so many more are some of my favorite stories when I’m not up for something intense or heavy.
I really like romance, teen drama, paranormal creatures, almost any type of fantasy, and space opera done well.
I do not much like horror or thriller, and you won’t find sad, depressing, or nonsensical endings in my books.
One last thing: Solo Storm is a pen name. Pen names are common in writing and I have several. My real name is Monica Leonelle, so if you see me having an identity crisis or not responding when you call my name, it’s because of this!
About LEGOs and Being an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO)
I’m also a huge LEGO enthusiast and AFOL (adult fans of LEGO) and own a solid collection that would not surprise an AFOL but would leave anyone else thinking WTAF? I’ve loved collecting things all my life, and as a military kid, spent a good portion of my childhood buying keychains from everywhere we went. (that collection got to over 100!) I also have a cool collection of tarot and oracle decks, but nothing thus far has rivaled LEGO.
LEGO excites me from many different angles. I loved LEGO as a kid, but my adult interest started with a conversation with my mother-in-law. We were talking about LEGO and I told her, “If I had the chance, I would go way too deep and buy all LEGO and spend all day building it and never get anything done. So this is my plan. When I’m in my sixties, I intend to pause my writing career and spend all my time gardening, reading, and playing with LEGO.”
I said it as a joke, but over the next month or so it really started to get me down too. Because let’s face it—none of us are promised tomorrow, much less decades from now. There was an immense sadness inside me because I genuinely didn’t think I had time or money to do something I suspected I would absolutely love. And I was going to wait decades to even give it a chance! All because I didn’t want to spend my limited resources on the simple act of having FUN with no strings attached.
My MIL got me a small LEGO set for Christmas—Harry Potter Moments: Transfiguration Class—and I built it with Patrick (my husband) on New Year’s Eve. I loved it so much that I had to get the other books. And then I loved it so much that I had to keep going with the Harry Potter theme…And then I got into other themes…Needless to say, I was not incorrect that I would get obsessed and I would spend too much money on my hobby!
As I learned more about LEGO as a company, as well as the economy its built around its products, the more fascinated I became. I have always had digital companies with mostly digital offerings, so a product company was new and fascinating to me! I eventually became interested beyond just having a personal collection, and started getting into some low-end brick investing aka brick gambling/speculation. I do it entirely for fun, because I love to study markets and supply and demand.
