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It has been a great week- but it reminded me how fragile we are as humans – and how even if all we aspire to is comfort and happiness, our minds try to protect us  and move us back to that comfort zone whenever we try to move outside of the zone where it feels we are safe.

Where this week have you found yourself starting then stopping on a writing goal or project? Did you write a few pages then suddenly get too busy with other things to get back to it or to finish it?  It happens so often with life that we can miss the signs of stopping ourselves just before we make the big breakthroughs.

Things to be alert for:

• If you are writing fiction as you are getting close to the finish are you beginning to feel sadness that you will soon be losing your friends who are the characters in your story?

• Then that pesky little nagging doubt of what if I have spent all of this time and no-one wants to read what I wrote.

• Then you might feel like you might be criticized by anyone who reads your material and you know how much you dislike being criticized.

• Then you might feel like you do not know how you will take it if you are rejected by publishers, readers, friends or family members who you asked to read your material and give you feedback.

Many aspiring authors have a goal to get 100 rejection letters when they first start to write and instead of being discouraged when they arrive, they see it as just another step in getting to the goal of 100. It becomes a positive rather than a negative.

So my question for you is:
How are you ever going to get up to the requisite 100 rejections if you do not apply yourself to finishing what you started to write, selling it yourself or online or submitting manuscripts?

I am sure you know it is a numbers game. If you are not receiving a multitude of rejections, then your writing efforts are producing minimal results.

You could be the next big thing but if nobody is considering your work, how will you ever find out?

Here is the deal–it is so easy to reside in a comfort zone – unwilling to receive feedback that might shatter the dream that you might find it easier to stop going for it than risk going for it and not succeeding.

But it has to be done.

Bumping into a fabulous contact in an elevator who can rocket you to fame and fortune would be nice but happens so infrequently that you must find a different strategy for being discovered.

You have to do what other writers have done since the beginning of communicating with others through writing: self publishing or submitting to publishers,agents and editors continually.

Start–finish–have work reviewed–self-publish or submit to others who might publish–then do it again. The more you repeat, the more you will move toward your dream of becoming an author.