Guest author Shelia Goss: Follow Your Dreams and Pursue Your Writing Goals

Shelia M. Goss is a national best-selling author and a 2012 Emma Award Finalist. She has thirteen books in print and seven ebooks. She writes in multiple genres: Christian fiction, romance, women’s fiction, suspense, and young adult. USA Today says, “Goss has an easy, flowing style with her prose…”  She's also the recipient of three Shades of Romance Magazine Readers Choice Multicultural Awards and is honored as a Literary Diva: The Top 100 Most Admired African American Women in Literature. To learn more, visit her website or follow her on Facebook.



Writing and wanting to be published comes with ups and downs. Sometimes it's easy to get discouraged when you have obstacle after obstacle against you. But if you feel that being an author is what you were born to do, you cannot let anything or anyone stand in your way.

So today, I want to talk about following your dreams and pursuing your writing goals.

You may be asking yourself: how can I achieve my dreams or goals of being a writer, if I'm working and going to school, have a family to take care of, kids and other responsibilities?

Here are a few things I've learned that will hopefully help you as you embark on pursuing your writing goals:

1. Remember, you only have one life to live. There are no do overs so why not pursue your dreams while you still have time. Don't let years pass you by and then you look back and say, I wish I had written that book. Now is the time.

2. Write it down. What is your dream or goal that you want to achieve? Write it down and place it somewhere where you can see it every day until it becomes a reality. Keep it in the forefront of your mind. Most importantly, if you want to be a writer, you must write. So write the story in your head down.

3. You must take a leap of faith. Know beyond a shadow of a doubt that your goal is attainable and put forth the effort that it will take to achieve it. That means take workshops, do your research, read books in the genre you want to write in, etc. Which leads to point #4.

4. Quitting is not an option. You will face obstacles. You will face rejections. Even after becoming published, you may get bad reviews. It's not going to be easy. But you can't allow the situations that will come up, to stop you from pursuing your goals in life. They may detour you, but don't allow them to stop you.

5. Set miniature goals in order to reach your ultimate goal. Simply set tasks that will lead you closer and closer to reaching your goal. Write a page a day. Then increase it to a chapter a day and before you know it, you will have completed a novel.

Set a goal to complete X number of pages or words by a certain date and don't allow anything to stand in the way of meeting that goal. A goal without a plan is just a wish. In order to make that wish into a reality, these are the things you must do.

     You must make plans.
     You must change your attitude.
     You must take action.
     You must focus.
     You must set boundaries with those around you.

Remember, You are never too old to pursue your dreams. Just don't let time pass you by. If I hadn't taken a leap of faith and pursued my dreams, I wouldn't be here today with more than thirteen books under my belt.

When you have a dream or a goal, you have to:

LIVE IT
FEEL IT
BELIEVE IT
and last, but not least, DO IT!

If you do all of those things you can ACHIEVE IT!