All year, I've been publishing essays about how to get through endless horror by making up stories. And now, here's the final essay!

The advice I want to leave y'all with: Write the book that ONLY YOU COULD HAVE WRITTEN. https://www.tor.com/2020/11/17/never-say-you-cant-survive-write-the-book-that-only-you-could-have-written/

Don't try and write what you think will be popular or what other people think is cool.

Don't try and follow some formula that someone else said is the perfect storytelling mad-libs, where X always happens on page 30.

Don't chase trends. Or try to jump on someone else's success.

Find your own personality as a storyteller and put it right there, on the page.

A story is a map of your own brain. All the storytelling choices you make show how your mind works.

When you write a story, you get to superimpose that map onto the world.

And one of the cool parts of writing fiction is that you get to know your own mind better. It's therapeutic in part because you can understand your own twisty mental pathways.

And you get to see yourself evolve as a person and as a writer. Maybe you even get better at navigating

The times I've been happiest writing have been the ones when I was doing something that felt super personal, a project that felt like I was putting a piece of myself out into the world. Even if it was a book about space pirates and goblins. Especially then.

My favorite projects are the ones that keep me thinking, "I don't know if I can pull this off--I don't know if anyone could-- but I'm having a blast trying."

The projects where I knew that some people would hate it no matter what. But hopefully some people would REALLY love it.

I love it when my brain, my heart and my gut flora team up to do something that's uniquely my thing. And that doesn't mean it has to be literary or experimental or fancy --- in fact, this is even more important if you're writing a romance about the nine kings of asteroidland.