Do you know the one thing that separates a successful writer from a non-successful? Okay, drum roll, here it is: the successful writer finishes. First drafts don’t have to be perfect, far from it. If you can’t write the second sentence of your story until the first sentence is perfect, you’re playing a losing game. You can spend days (weeks?) making it perfect, but line 17 might undermine that perfection, and before you know it, you’re caught in an endless loop of going back to “fix” your previous work. Then you never finish. Remember the first job of any book is to get read!

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Vicki Reed combined her love for horses, nature, and kids in trouble in creating her award-winning novel The Car Thief. A Boy’s Perilous Journey through the Juvenile Justice System.  Her follow-up novel Sleight of Hand was recently released. A graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and a life-long Ky resident, she lives in Lexington with her husband and son. She continues to be active in juvenile justice and child welfare issues on a state and national level.