Give your dreams some breathing room

When I was trying to break in as a writer, I got scads of rejection slips, and every one of them hit me like a sledgehammer to the stomach.  The voices in my head were screaming monsters, filled with doubt, fear, pain, guilt, anger, and an increasingly hollow sense of futility.

 

Give up.  I’m wasting my life.  There is no hope.

 

Every night when I went to bed. Every morning when I woke up.  This was before I had a formal structure of “the Machine” but I had read Bradbury’s advice to “write...