Write. Write every day. Write whether you feel like writing or<br>not. Choose a time of day. Perhaps you can get up an hour<br>earlier, stay up an hour later, give up an hour of recreation,<br>or even give up your lunch hour. If you can't tink of<br>anything in your chosen genre, keep a journal. You should<br>be keeping one anyway. Journal writing helps you to be<br>more observant of your world, and a journal is a good<br>place to store story ideas for later projects.<br><br>Revise your writing until it's as good as you can make it. All<br>the reading, the writing, and the classes should help you<br>do this. Check your writing, your research (never neglect<br>your research), and the physical appearance of your<br>manuscript. Let nothing substandard slip through. If you<br>notice something that needs fixing, fix it, no excuses.<br>There will be plenty that's wrong that you worit catch.<br>Dorit make the mistake of ignoring flaws that are obvious<br>to you. The moment you find yourself saying, “This doesn't<br>matter. It's good enough” Stop. Go back. Fix the flaw.<br>Make a habit of doing your best<br><br>Submit your work for publication. First research the<br>markets that interest you. Seek out and study the books or<br>magazines of publishers to whom you want to sell. Then<br>submit your work. If the idea of doing this scares you, fine.<br>Go ahead and be afraid. But send your work out anyway. If<br>its rejected, send it out again, and again. Rejections are<br>painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's ite of<br>passage. Don't give up on a piece of work that you can't<br>sell. You may be able to sell it later to new publications or<br>to new editors of old publications. At worst, you should be<br>able to lean from your rejected work. You may even be<br>able to use all or part of it in a new work. One way or<br>another, writers can use, or at least lear from, everything.<br>