Leilanie Stewart

Creative writing is hard. It isn’t easy to make time every day, or week, or whenever you can to pour words onto a computer screen, especially if you (like the majority of writers) aren’t being paid for it.

My mindset today is quite different than a decade ago. Ten years ago, I was motivated by big dreams of getting a literary agent and a big, mainstream publisher. I wanted a big advance and to retire from my day job to work, full-time, as an author. I was motivated by rags to riches stories like those of J.K. Rowling and E.L. James. After a string of rejections, and one or two glossy offers of publication that soon lost their shine, I soon forgot about agents, publishers and unrealistic big advances, or notions of the full-time author dream and began to focus on getting my work out into the world. After all, what good is 3 sample chapters of a novel MS if they’re left sitting on an editor’s desk for a year, only to be glanced at for five minutes, then given a form rejection. Nope; I was much too impatient for that, and wanted more control over my writing fate.