She stared at the notification that had pinged onto the screen of her phone.

‘Don’t break your 15 day writing streak! Keep going!’

She stifled a yawn. She just wanted to lay her head on her pillow and drift to sleep. But she knew she should write. She’d made that commitment to herself, after all.

She opened up the writing app and looked at the writing prompt for today.”Write a story about a character writing a story. Maybe this character represents yourself and the struggles and joys you meet when trying to write your own work.”

As the early morning birds chirped outside her window, she started typing mindlessly. She was an author, after all. Not a published one… yet. But she’d decided that this was what she was. And because writers write, that’s what she must do too. It needed to become a habit. A knee-jerk reaction. It should feel strange to her to *not* write every day.

So she typed one word after another, unsure where her slightly unsettling piece of self-reflection was heading.

She paused, wondering what the hazy future would bring. It will probably all seem so straightforward in a few years’ time. So obvious. So clear.

But that’s the wonderful thing about hindsight, isn’t it? It always has 20/20.

But today? Now? She didn’t have that.

And while she tried her best to soldier on and ignore those doubts and fears biting away at the edges of her consciousness, she couldn’t ignore them.

How long? The last time - the *only* time she’d written a full novel, was in her mid-teens. She cracked a smile. She dreaded to think what she’d think now if she ever read it again. And where did she put it anyway? She remembered it was in a presentation folder with a bright blue plastic cover.

Anyway, that was by the by. What mattered was *now*.

And the question now was whether she should go all-in. Dare she?

She’d had a few wonderful pieces of feedback from other authors online: How they’d felt engrossed in her short stories, and how they’d loved her writing style.

‘You need to write!’ they said. And she smiled. It felt like balm for the soul, for they echoed the whispers of her own heart.

All roads led here - to this moment.

It was the moment where she would decide whether she would go all-in as a novelist. Or to take the safer route and hedge her bets. Hedging your bets sounds safer, doesn’t it? But is it, truly? Isn’t that what she’d done all her life? And yet she still found herself pondering this very dilemma.

And anyway, she’d never been good at multi-tasking. Hedging her bets meant she’d have to split her focus between something else and writing her novels. And if she chose that path, wouldn’t both end up suffering?

Her heart called for her to write the novels. To type like the wind and empty her heart of all the weird and wonderful worlds and adventures that she’d stored in there for so many years. All those characters whose stories had gone untold all that time. They were yearning to burst out - pleading to.

But it took courage. It took courage to decide to put her stake in the ground and say to the world, “I am an author. This is what I do. Because there are millions of characters and worlds inside my mind who are yearning to stake their claim on the page. And they give me no choice but to set them free.”

Should she do it? Could she do it?

Her mind screamed, “Risk!”

And yet, her heart whispered, “Yes.”