Onward. Always onward.

Hello again, peeps. Hope everyone has now fully (or almost-fully) recovered from New Year's.

This will be (mercifully) quick as I'm working on some revisions and need Twitter to distract me. I'm diligent that way.

First (and most importantly) I need to sibling-info-drop. My beloved and beautiful sister has started a blog for her company, which you can check out here. She does sales and marketing in Knoxville, TN. If you're in that area, you should look her up. At any rate, please leave her a comment (cause that would be super awesome), and if you're a business and marketing connoisseur, you should definitely follow her. She's quite wise. Heck, even if you're not, you should follow her. Her business and our business really aren't that far removed from one another. AND whenever we're all published and have to market ourselves, you'll already have some great tips to start with.

Secondly (and writing-related, believe it or not), I had a fun Twitter conversation with a super-cool writer (whose blog you will find here; pop in and say hi to her too!!! [I'm so demanding tonight]) about fear. And, as usual, my head took off with the idea. What if Anne Rice had been too afraid to write Interview with the Vampire. What if JK Rowling had been too afraid to write the Harry Potter novels? Or Stephanie Meyer to write the Twilight series? Honestly. Where would we be as a culture? I know it seems silly to think about even these novels as capable of changing our culture, but they did. Anne Rice made vampires sexy (ok, sexier). She gave us Lestat, who is my person quintessential vampire. J.K. Rowling made LEGO Harry Potter possible and spawned God-only-knows how many people to start writing. Same with Stephanie Meyer (minus the LEGO bit). I mean, you talk about Lestat, Harry, Hermione, Snape, Edward, Bella, and Jacob, and EVERYONE knows who you're talking about.

But what if they had never met print? (No, no jokes. I'm trying to keep this serious here.)

These stories have jump-started careers. Until Edward Cullen, Robert Pattinson was just that dude from HP (GASP!). Without HP, he probably would have remained unknown. No one had a clue who Taylor Lautner was. And let's face it. Tom Cruise was fabulous as Lestat (my opinion, I know I know).

My point here is this: Anne Rice, JK Rowling, and Stephenie Meyer never set out to change our culture or our way of thinking. They had stories that they thought people wanted to read. They had that drive that pushes all of us toward publication, and they persevered. They didn't fold up at the first rejection like a surprising amount of writers do. Heck. They didn't quit midway through the manuscript. They pushed themselves.

Anne Rice on Interview: "I developed slowly and in secret. My rejection slip period lasted nine months with the manuscript of Interview with the Vampire and involved five rejection slips, some of which were just hilariously negative. I just went right on pushing. I think I was fortunate. But I didn't really try to be published until I was thirty-four, and had a complete book in my hands. And then that complete book was rewritten and greatly expanded after its acceptance by Knopf."

We have to keep on pushing. Through hilariously negative rejections, through horrendous self-doubt and self-loathing, through writer's block and endless rewrites. Because we're writers. And that's what we do.