I remember the day many years ago when I sat down to write a novel, me with a few short stories under my belt, a stressful job, and no training in writing other than a voracious and eclectic appetite for reading good fiction.

How could I be creative? Impossible! Audacious!

Yet with every sentence I scribbled, with every word I agonized over, and eventually with every meeting of a local writer’s group, the HABIT of creating sunk into my soul. I made myself a creative by creating.

And now I have a literary agent who believes in me. The me who wrote those first sentences in pencil in a lined notebook would never have believed it possible.