I wrote my way out.

Book reviews have been fun, but there's something I want to address about writing and I've been thinking about the right way to go about it without making enemies out of published authors everywhere. What am I talking about? The rules of writing a book. Google it, you'll find thousands of pieces of advice from every author in the world of various fame. Hell, I've got an entire Pinterest board of almost 500 pins on what I should and shouldn't be doing.

I'm by no means famous, but I have actually finished a book and in doing so managed to break a long string of writer's block. I've been writing since I was a teenager, and I like to think I'm pretty decent at it. I read a lot, I'm pretty good at pegging the "next big thing". I like to think of myself as the target audience for a lot of books/means of entertainment.

So here's the secret, Ladies and Gentlemen: There are no rules. (Also, if you've never seen this commercial you're missing out. I laugh every time it's on because I'm easily amused.)

The question for me when writing my book, or anything for the last year, was "Does this have what it takes to be successful?" I was obsessed, thinking everything had to be perfect in the first draft. Nothing was ever good enough, I kept telling myself that I wasn't good enough. I would joke around about trash books like Fifty Shades and Twilight and how if they could get published, anything could. It was a means to make myself feel better about what I interpreted as a failure. We all do it. Because writer's are very fickle people, whether we admit it or not. For God's sake, we spend hours planted in front of a notebook or a computer laughing and crying about our own manuscripts. That's the very definition of fickle!

I drove myself crazy with my own few of perfection, of success and whether or not people would like what I had created. The idea that they wouldn't devastated me.

Then I got sick. For those of you who don't know I have moderate Rheumatoid Arthritis, I was diagnosed in November 2015. For those who have an auto-immune disorder, you know that it's a guessing game as to what's going to work or what's not. The pills they had me on made dehydrated and sick to the point where I went almost two months were I couldn't work, couldn't drive. I spent my days going to have tests: MRI's, X-Rays, Blood draws. It was a pretty sad existence there for a minute.

The only thing I had left was my book, my writing. I retreated there because it'd take my mind off the pain, off the feeling of absolute worthlessness. I threw myself into something I really loved, and did it for me. I stopped caring what everyone else thought, stopped trying to follow these supposed "rules" that I'd heard so much about but had never actually seen in list form ANYWHERE. I wrote to please myself, and I found it came a thousand times easier. I broke years of writer's block where I'd tried everything from changing my location, to changing fonts on the page waiting for inspiration to hit me like an on-coming train, to keeping writing journals to making massive plot tree's. But only by finding the joy in doing it again, did I ever find the courage to finish it. That's the secret; if you enjoy writing the book, I truly believe people will enjoy reading the book.

So the long and short of it is this. You don't have to be college educated, you don't have to have the best plot, you don't have to already be a "successful" writer- (I heard once that writing a first draft is like shoveling sand into a sandbox, just get it there and you can play around with it later)- You just have to love it. You have to be committed to it, you have to find your own voice and stop trying to use someone else's. If you have a story to tell, do it, damnit! Don't wait, just put your fingers on the keyboard or the pen to the paper and do it! If it sucks, it sucks, but it's yours and you should own it.

I want to leave you with this thought, and I hope this inspires at least one person to do something worthwhile. Then I'll feel like I accomplished something. It doesn't have to be writing, this could apply to anything you're doing right now; something you're struggling with. I hope my words inspire you to keep with it no matter how hard it is. In my best Social-Workry voice, "I believe in you".

"Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word, write it down."

Neil Gaiman