This week I corresponded with a friend of mine who is writing a memoir. She had some questions, and I had some answers she had to wrap her head around for a day or two. At one point, she wrote something akin to "I thought I was running a 5k, and I got two miles in and realized it was a 10k." I nodded sagely and spent last night working on my own novel for two more hours, two hours added to the hundreds I've spent since I started writing in 2009.

We wrote back and forth a little more, and I told her about my own struggles and time commitments. I told her how I felt when someone asked me at BlogHer '11 if I'd sold the novel I mentioned at BlogHer '10 yet and I had to say no, that I'd thought it was finished but it was so not finished last summer. Not finished at all. I've overhauled it completely since then.

Somewhere along the line, I had to face the -- is it humiliation? Maybe that's too strong a word. But it's an emotion similar to that, the sort of emotion that drops your stomach an inch when it hits you, the sort that brings a flush to your cheeks and a burn to your ears and maybe some frustrated tears to your eyes, whether you want it to or not. It's something akin to humiliation that creative people feel when they talk about their work publicly and then don't immediately succeed in the eyes of the world, in their own eyes even. It's something akin to humiliation that stops many people before they even start.

I faced it pretty hard core that day at BlogHer '11 when I realized I'd talked about this novel at my panel and then had the audacity to show up a year later with no hardcover to sell. There's a balance one must achieve between laziness or fear and hubris in order to query at all. In order to survive rejection, you have to be confident in your writing, in what you're doing. It's a mental game as much as any endurance sport, because you can't win unless you compete and finish, and just finishing alone can feel so insurmountable most days.

I write about my process here because I hear behind the scenes from so many people who think book deals drop out of the sky. Since I started working on Sleep Is for the Weak, I've managed to meet and become friendly with at least twenty published authors, and they all echo back what I emailed my friend this week: It's hard. It's painful. It's worth it. Don't give up.

I've always found the community of writers online to be so tremendously supportive of each other.

At BlogHer '11, Lisa, Elisa and Jory announced a writers conference put on by BlogHer and presented by Penguin in New York City on October 21. I'm going to go. I'm hoping to meet in person a few of those authors who were such an inspiration for me. If you find yourself in that place where you need those emails, you should go, too. But either way -- it's hard, it's painful, it's worth it, don't give up.

I won't, either. Ann Napolitano, one of our current authors, didn't -- it took her six years to write the novel I just read for BlogHer Book Club. And the writing was memorable, exciting and worth every minute, in my opinion.