If you want to be a writer, get to writing. You’ve got to get that next article or story or novel written and edited and rewritten and edited and edited again. It’s work. It takes time. You’re not going to get any of that accomplished by sitting around the coffee house talking to the other poets about how cool it is that all of you are writers. Go write.

Originally released in the early 1960s, Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” reads as fresh as any dark fantasy novel or horror piece written today, and it’s as well written as the best of the genre, Stephen King and Dean Koontz and the like.

You’ve spent hours and hours on a story or article. Maybe you’ve even spent months or years working on a book. Congratulate yourself. You’ve accomplished something important. But the work isn’t over. In fact, in many ways, the hardest work is just beginning.