2 - Reading
Obvious, I suppose.  Though I was introduced to the written word at an age earlier than most. While in the womb, my Dad read Watership Down to me.  Later, it was Lord of the Rings.  I remember in Kindergarten, too shy to fight for the best toys, I huddled in the small reading area, devouring every book with a voracious appetite for story and vocabulary.  After I finished I read them all again.  I’ve always been an avid reader, my only complaint being that, given a hundred lifetimes, there would still be far too much to read.

3 - Contest
For a writer, competition and deadlines help you beat the blank page by terrifying you into writing something.  In grade 8, the Earl Marriott Secondary Herald announced their annual writing contest.  Being a student, I of course ignored such notices.  But my mom read the announcement and wrote just above it: Lee see me re: this Love Mom.  I owe her a debt of gratitude, as that contest gave me a deadline and a much needed push.  So instead of rewriting the first thirty pages of the fantasy story I was working on, I started and actually finished a short story called “Avar’s Quest”.  It placed first in the Surrey school district.

4 - Recognition
Following my success the first year entering the contest, I proceeded to submit something every year until graduation.  For five years I had a clear deadline to write something, and so I did (although I always got my story in the last possible day, agonizing over revisions until the final hour).  Each year I received further recognition.  Having my name in the headline of the local paper was a thrill, the realization that my writing was being read and recognized giving me the first inklings of what it felt like to be a writer.

5 - Rejection
My degree in biology finished, I returned to writing after a long hiatus, over the following year completing my fantasy novel and thirty science fiction short stories. Having discovered my genre of choice, writers’ block became a foreign concept.  I no longer needed the most brilliant idea in the world to get started; the ideas were simply there, and they worked.  Then I started submitting to publishers, and the rejections soon piled up quicker than the stories.  I decided to display them on my bedroom wall, just above the bed so I would see them every morning and night, determined that they wouldn’t come down until I got accepted.  What followed was a very humbling process:  a doubting of my ability, questioning the viability of such a career, and feeling like my years of work may never amount to anything.  Perhaps this experience is one every writer must—or should—go through.  After rejection number forty-one, I made my first professional sale.

6 - Published
Many dreams have floated through my head, and I’ve taken them all seriously.  But none have I worked harder towards than having my words in print and on the bookstore shelf.  With my novelette, “Evolution’s End”, I achieved that goal.  The moment of tangible truth came on August 19, 2006, the day after the awards ceremony in San Diego.  At Mysterious Galaxy Books I picked up a copy of Writers of the Future, volume XXII, and felt the power of the words within.

7 - Travelling
Visiting places that are novel, places your eyes haven’t set upon before and your neurons have never processed, forces your mind to form new connections and pathways.  The colour-soaked saris of Indian women wading into the ocean, the scent of elephant dung on the dust-filled Kenyan plains, the calluses forming while scaling hundreds of stone steps barefoot to a hilltop temple, the leaves of the Bodhi tree being picked from the ground as though they are gifts from Buddha himself.  All of these experiences manifest themselves as creative inspiration.  I started my first novel while in England, and the second while in India; neither is a coincidence.  But one need not venture halfway across the world to germinate their seed of imagination:  sometimes a walk down the road is enough.  The journey begins this very moment.  The path awaits you.