It’s discouraging sometimes, walking into a bookstore and eyeing all those books. Look at all those successful writers who have written so much good stuff. Will you ever have your own small space on a Barnes & Noble shelf?

I don’t know what your bookstores are like. But near my hometown, there’s a Barnes & Noble so big they have an escalator AND an elevator to get to the second floor. Maybe that’s typical in bigger cities. But I could live in there, literally.

When I headed up to Naperville for John Green’s book tour stop, I spent a few hours in Barnes & Noble just looking. Just marveling at all the things all those authors had crafted.

Fiction is a side project for me. But it hasn’t always been. Back when all I wanted to do was write novels, I often felt that chronic discouragement you’ve probably felt…