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Sometimes you just have to tell the story you have to tell. It may be way out here, like having a dog for a narrator (Who’s going to publish that?) or a story about a spider or one told by a dead girl.

You have to be brave. It’s hard. It’s very hard to write something that you know is pretty far out there. When I began my ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES novel about aliens landing and taking over the world and enslaving everyone, I thought—really? Am I really going to try to write this? It’s so, well, weird. Who will publish it? You don’t want to have these thoughts. You just want to write, but most novels take a year or more to finish. It’s a chunk of time and your life. But ultimately we’re writers and that’s what we do and part of that is taking chances, following your passion. I suppose this is the writer’s way of following Joseph Campbell’s advice: follow your bliss.

Every time you write it’s a kind of leap of faith. You have to be brave. If your story is a strange one and it’s going to be told in a strange way, it may be harder to sell to a publisher. That’s true. But who knows what will happen then? An author named Stein did write a book from a dog’s point of view called THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN. Great novel. Great reviews. Bestseller. And of course Charlotte’s Web is a great novel about a spider and ELSEWHERE and THE LOVELY BONES are novels with POV narrators who are dead girls. You just never know. You have to write what you have to write. You have to be brave.

Know a college kid who'd like to intern with a prestigious literary blogger? Well Ron Hogan over at Galleycat's looking for someone.

Obviously, most of the GalleyCat readership skews towards the gainfully employed, but maybe you know some enterprising journalism or creative writing major who'd be interested in (among other duties) soliciting guest essays, doing short interviews with authors, and formatting essays and interview transcripts for online publication. At the very least, such an intern would make a lot of industry contacts and, if they impress enough, earn a glowing recommendation; I'd even be willing to talk to department heads about course credit if somebody wanted to put that on the table. So if you know anybody who'd be interested, have them get in touch with me.