Q&A are back
Posted on January 7th, 2009 | by Tom |As I mentioned in the first post, this blog has went through many format changes. One thing that has remained constant is the Q&A section. I have done a lot of things in my career and some of the lessons learned have been painful. So, if by sharing my knowlege I can help my readers avoid the same stumbling blocks, I am more than happy to! Also, when the ideas are not flowing, it helps me to have a subject to blog about 
So, if you have any questions about Writing, Computers, Networking with people or Marketing, email them to me and I will see if I can answer them. For the moment, just use the form on the contact page, I may add a direct email later on. I searched through my archives to see if any of the questions are still relevant and I found a couple that are worth repeating.
Q&A: What advice would you could give a new writer?
RUN!!! LOL just kidding…my advice would be to define what success is to you and never stop until you achieve it. What is the goal of your writing? If you do not have an answer for that, sit down and think it through. Do you want to write a book? Do you write for the sheer fun of it? Do you want to entertain or do you want to make a lot of money? If you don’t have a clear idea of what success is to you, then you will never know when you achieve it. Set yourself small goals at first. Submit an article, take a class or just set a schedule to write for one hour a day and stick to it for a month.
Writing is hard and unless you are supremely talented, you will need to put in the hours to hone your craft. I read a article recently where the author said that writing a book was harder than giving birth. That was depressing. I have always been thankful that, as a man, I will never have to go through child-birth and now I am told that my career will visit far worse tortures upon me….goodie!. Even so, I won’t let that stop me from writing my book and you can’t either. Maybe not the child-birth bit but you get what I am saying. In a recent newsletter from Filbert Publishing, Beth Ann Erikson said it best, “If you give up, you fail.” Simple and direct. I like that. Everytime you write an article, book, grocery list, death threat, etc, you are getting better. You will make mistakes, many…many…MANY mistakes but they are not failures. Those mistakes are bringing you closer to success and the only way to truly fail, is to stop trying.