I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even mat­ter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even mat­ter
—Linkin Park

The 2000s were a hor­ri­ble decade for me, per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally and cre­atively. I lost sev­eral jobs, lost my place to live twice and after fin­ish­ing Between Heaven and Hell in 1997, “Do Over!” in 1998 and the “In shin­ing Armor” screen­play in 1999, I didn’t fin­ish another work of fic­tion until the very last month of the decade, Decem­ber of 2009 with the first draft of Rev­e­la­tion.

And yet, I grew more as a writer in the 2000s than any other time in my life.

My sin­gle biggest les­son of the decade in terms of writ­ing is that all writ­ing counts. All of it, any­thing you can do helps you grow and develop. While I didn’t fin­ish much in the 2000s, I wrote 80,000 words of the sequel to BHH, a story that will now be mod­i­fied as book four of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. I wrote 60,000 words on Home­world, my Mars novel. But the real kicker is that I wrote half a mil­lion words of non­fic­tion between my var­i­ous blogs and free­lance work for other sites. and com­ing back to fic­tion after my “lost decade,” it’s amaz­ing how much bet­ter my prose is because of writ­ing all that nonfiction.

Words are words, peo­ple. Every­thing you write makes you bet­ter. Every word. And this les­son is what makes it pos­si­ble for me to give away a seven book series in Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. because even if these books don’t get pub­lished in the tra­di­tional sense — and keep in mind I very much intend to get my later work pub­lished tra­di­tion­ally — they still make me bet­ter as a writer just by writ­ing them.

Not a sin­gle word you write is ever wasted, pub­lished or not. It all helps you learn the craft. it all teaches you. It all increases your mas­tery of lan­guage. So write as much as you can, as often as you can. Don’t worry about mar­ketabil­ity, don’t worry about sell­ing, just write. It’s all worth it, espe­cially if you’re lost.