And sometimes it just comes down to pure, dumb luck. I wrote for years and 25 of the 30 people reading my stuff were my own family.

One day, out of sheer boredom, I write a fake obituary for a character that got whacked on The Walking Dead and sent it to a friend who was a newspaper editor in a small town in Arkansas — just as a private joke. I still don’t know how this happened, but within three days it was global. I mean, every major news outlet on television, every major magazine in the English speaking world, and newspapers on six continents were featuring it.

That was more than three years ago, and I’m back to my faithful flock of 25–30 diehards. The biggest lesson I learned from that is, the more you chase it and try to force it, the less likely it’ll ever happen.