via Heather Petty

[essbeejay]

Authors need each other in this really weird way.

We need the authors we most admire to give us something to aspire to—some reason to keep trying and growing no matter how successful we are in our own careers. We need authors whose work we don’t like to remind us how fickle and subjective the industry is and how we’re writing for a diverse and varied audience of people with their own tastes, experiences, and needs.

We need the authors who seemingly made it without trying to remind us that some of it comes down to luck, and we need the workhorses to remind us that most of it comes down to brutal amounts of hard work.

But mostly we need author friends. We need people who speak our language and understand the quirks, the hysteria, and the interminable waiting that comes with the creation of a book. We need people to be our fans when no one else is allowed to see what we’ve spent so much time creating. We need them to rally around the potential of a crappy idea and to pick apart even the most beautifully rendered paragraph so that we can make it better and better. Always better.

Mostly, though, we need our author friends to believe in being successful. We need them to keep moving forward in the face of everyone and everything telling them to stop. We need their lights to shine so bright, it almost doesn’t seem dark out there. Because, sometimes, that’s the only way we can see the sharp rocks at our feet.

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