As an unpublished writer, I have no lessons to impart. Not based on real experience anyway. Not based on the physical, tangible life that I have been living. Because that has never been where I lived. I reside in a place nobody has access to. The fantasy world I choose to concoct every day, awake and asleep, has no highways leading up to it.

The only valuable experience is the collection of emotions I bottle up in a jar, the ones I feel when I sit in front of a blank page.

The utter terror, the unlimited imagination, the undeniable excitement, they're all things I feel for something yet to happen. For a story yet to be written. I imagine all writers go through this. And I imagine this is of most value to them. The story behind the blinding white that must be coaxed out of hiding, to be paraded in front of the world, newly polished and correctly marketed. It is the seductive power of this invisible that appeals to me. And it is this very invisible that cripples me.

I've spent so much time learning to reveal a story to myself. How do I reveal it to the world? How do I market it? Can I be a writer without a reader? How do I shout over all the other loud voices telling their own stories? I don't have the answers.

All I know is that successful writers have been so because they went beyond their core skill. They actually sold what they wrote! And the selling price differs vastly. We live in a country where content is finally valued, but no one knows how to value it yet. I've interviewed with enough people to know that good writing is wanted, demanded but no one wants to pay the right price for it.

They are, after all, just words on a page, rearranged to say something meaningful or to sound pleasant.

And if the correct pattern is in the keyboard then why pay someone to type it out when you can take a crack at it yourself? How long could it take anyway?

Whether it is content writing, script writing, copywriting, the jobs are out there but they range from unpaid to underpaid. And fiction? That is a startup business. I'm still learning the ropes and I suppose it is never too early or too late to begin failing. Still, it could be disheartening to carry on and sometimes I don't know who I'm writing for. Sometimes I write for you. Sometimes I write for me. Sometimes I write so badly it can be for nobody. But I write it anyway.

And why not? It's free!