Hey Leigh! ❤️ When you started out writing and you decided to write YA fantasy, did you feel silly at all? I've been writing a story for a while and it's fantasy, and I always feel really self conscious when I tell ppl about it bc whenever I do, a lot of t

Yeah, unfortunately, there’s still a tremendous bias against genre fiction. But you may want to remind these kind people that the Iliad and the Odyssey are fantasy, that Spencer’s Faerie Queene is fantasy, that Shakespeare’s Tempest is fantasy, and that they are ALL taught in schools. (To say nothing of the magical realism of Marquez, Allende, Morrison, and Erdrich who are some of my all time favorite authors.) 

Write what you love and remember that, when someone tries to shame you, it’s usually because they’re afraid of what you might accomplish if you stop caring what they think.