Have you ever been utterly humbled in an area you thought you were succeeding at? That happened to me last month when I went to Dragonsteel Nexus 2025. I’d spent the previous few weeks reading the original Mistborn trilogy. Between reading Brandon Sanderson’s books, listening to the other authors at Dragonsteel, and seeing other indie authors there with their tables, and then comparing it to what I’d written and published, I realized that I am a very small, deformed fish in an ocean of sharks as far as my writing goes. I can’t hold a candle to them. That is why my books have failed. Compared to them, my books are badly written, badly edited, the stories badly told, and the packaging so poorly done that it was foolish of me to ever assume I could sell anything at all. After all, I’m just me. My books aren’t beautiful, they haven’t had ten editors combing through them to find all the errors, and I don’t have a mountain of people clamoring to tell me how much they love me.

It is beyond humbling, terrifying, and embarrassing. I feel like a poor shabby woman brought into the capital where everyone’s dresses are expensive and perfect, precious stones abound. I feel like an absolute idiot for ever thinking I could be an author.

When I told my husband how insignificant and pathetic I feel when measured against other authors, he just said, “I think I would still rather you be a tryer than not.”

I gotta say, that stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t know how to respond. I just sat there mulling this over and wondering how I’d managed to marry a guy like him.

Because he was right. He said what I’ve written into my stories: when my characters face an insurmountable problem, and are suffering and don’t know what to do, they say, “I know I probably won’t win, but I refuse to die without trying.”

I write my characters that way because I believe that trying to do something, no matter how impossible, is still better than giving in to our natural tendency to rot rather than reach for the impossible.

It reminded me of what I wrote on the plane on the way here, while looking out the window as we took off:

“We live in a time when men can fly. Let that sink in for a bit. We do not fly like birds, with their instinctual grace; no, we fly with the power of our intellect and the brute force of our refusal to be chained by our nature. There is a beauty in that, I think, a beauty all its own, to rival the majesty of nature. We are small gods who often do not realize not only our potential, but our accomplishments, unique amongst the creatures of our world.”

No one thought man could fly until some crazy dreamers refused to take no for an answer and figured out how to do it.

I might not be a “successful” author by others’ standards. My books aren’t pretty or popular.

But they are ME. My books are a wall of imperfect, rough-hewn, unpolished blocks made of my own frustrations and trauma and ugly muddling through life—a wall manned by characters I cobbled together from what I wish I could be—a wall built to stand between me and the dreadful yawning maw of depression.

Walls like these can’t be made of anything else, I think.

So I guess I’ll follow in my characters’ footsteps and heed my husband’s advice, and be a tryer, because even if no one else cares, I think I’m a soul worthy of fighting for.

And who knows? Maybe someday I’ll also figure out how to fly.