Asteria Lee asked Laurell K. Hamilton:

Hello! I've always wanted to ask you this question. How did you sit down at age 17 and tell yourself to write when there are so many authors out there competing with your own writing and you have no idea if your stories are going to ever hit the shelves? Your writing is amazing, you're my favorite author, but when you were young and collecting rejection slips, how did you manage to tell yourself to keep going?

Laurell K. Hamilton I never thought of it as competing with other authors. The only person I competed with was myself by finishing more stories, and getting better as a writer, by writing more, because that's the only way you get better.

Ray Bradbury wrote an article that was either in, The Writer, or Writer's Digest, when I was in high school. He said, to pick a small room in your house and when you've wallpapered it with rejection slips then you will have written the crap writing that everyone has in them, and gotten to the good stuff that only you can write. I chose the only bathroom in our house and saw every rejection slip as one step closer to being the writer I wanted to be.

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