Last night the kids and I attended a talk by Bryan Davis, author of the Dragons in Our Midst and Oracles of Fire series of books. He spoke on fantasy writing and detailed his own journey from computer geek to fiction writer. A couple of things he said stuck out to me.
1. He spent 7 years writing his first book 24 times before it was published.
2. He received over 200 rejections before he got an acceptance.
3. When his first dragon book was picked up by a publisher, the publisher came to him to ask for it.
Writers are a stubborn bunch. It takes pretty thick skin to put yourself out for criticism and rejection again and again and again. You've got to believe in your book: you've got to believe in yourself.
Or you've got to be driven by something that you can't control, a story that burns within you that you must release.
When I sit at my computer and agonize over the fifth draft of a book, it's not because I love failure... it's because I can't NOT write this story.
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