The topic of copyrighting something has bothered me for my entire writing life, so I’d like to address it. When you write something or record something that is original, that work is automatically copyrighted. You don’t have to hide it away in a drawer and treat it as if it’s the holy grail. You don’t have to keep the title from other authors or creators; it’s your work, not theirs. That said, officially registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office gives you a great advantage legally.

I’m saying you must put the work into your fiction to get it as close to perfect as possible. I’m saying you spend the time and energy, that you have the fire in your gut to do what needs to be done to get your novel as close as you can to where literary agents, acquisitions editors, publishers, or, if you’re self-publishing, YOU can’t kick holes through the damn thing. Is this an easy task? Nope. Will you want to give up? Yep. Or most of us will, anyway.

I liken all of the parts of a novel to baking a cake. Yes, we may have all the ingredients—the flour, the sugar, the vanilla, the milk, the butter, but now it’s time to learn how to put them all together so the cake is not only a cake, but it’s a cake that you want to eat until you can’t eat anymore. Until you must unbutton those jeans of yours and you’re on the brink of diabetes. Until writing great fiction becomes an addiction you can only satisfy by getting more of it