At the end of the day, it's not about how many books are sold. Yes of course it helps to sell a million copies, but what I want is growth. I love to make up and tell stories. I like to build a world of lies and have it come crashing down around you. I like for someone to read what I have written and say, "I HATED Blake," or "I'm in love Wren," because that means I was able to make the character so real you had an emotional connection with them. I write from the depths of my mind and pull ideas out of the darkness. Ideas that I often feel normal people shouldn't have. For instance, I have never committed any heinous crime, but somehow I equate slicing into human flesh would be like slicing through a loaf of balogna. The initial pinch from when one first punctures the surface of the skin, and then it should cut cleanly until you hit the bone. The weird things that circulate through your mind, where the normal folk say to get help, I say, "Someone get me a pen and paper!" All of the dark thoughts that you would never share you get to nurture it and grow it into some epic tale for others to read and emote. Any type of artist, especially us fiction writers, have to have a little bit of crazy to push the envelopes of our imagination past the point of fear. The fear of judgment. We truly have to own the ideal that we don't care what others are going to think of our work, but we care more about how they react to what they've read. This is just to get through the manuscript, so you don't stifle your creativity. You must write. I will write. I will always write, and as I write I will continue grow. My nuances, my flow, my genre, or my style overall may change, but as long as the change is due to growth I have no problems with that. All I want to do is grow and not be afraid to do so.