I started researching self-publishing a couple of years before publishing my first novel in 2014. Richard, my editor and a close friend, discovered Joe Konrath's blog way back in, gosh, 2012 or so. Maybe earlier!

From there, we slowly began consuming the wisdom of other indie authors. Dean Wesley Smith and his "Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing" posts. His wife Kris Rusch, whose weekly "Business Musings" are a personal favorite. David Gaughran of Let's Get Digital fame, and Joanna Penn, and Mark Dawson, and Nick Stephenson, and Chris Fox, and...

Indie authors are one of the most helpful groups of people out there, hands down. They're always sharing what works and doesn't work for them, if you know where to find it, and engaging with newer authors to give them a leg up, too.

And boy, are we newbs grateful. These men and women, many of them pioneers of the modern self-publishing movement, have been my unofficial mentors for years now. I've religiously consumed everything of theirs that I could get my hands on, read and reread it, applied what I could to my own business, and gradually moved forward thanks to the kindness of generous strangers.

About six months ago, though, as I was reading a blog post of one of indie publishing's top-notch authors, a blasphemous thought intruded: I no longer found this author's posts useful.

Oh, said author was still putting out useful information, stuff I would've done anything to get my hands on when I was just starting out.

But I realized, eventually, that it wasn't what I needed at that stage in my career.

I started looking at the blog posts of other authors I follow, and was shocked to discover that I felt exactly the same way about them as I did about that first author.

It wasn't that the information they provided was bad, or that I didn't need it anymore. That's not true at all. It just wasn't right for me at that moment. By clinging to these authors' writings, I was holding myself back in a huge way.

At this point, I've published more than seventy pieces of fiction. Still, if you had asked me a month ago what stage I was at in my career, I would've said, "I'm a baby writer. Still learning, still have a long way to go."

But that's also not true. I'm not a baby writer anymore. I've done my time in the nest, being nurtured by some of the finest minds and talents in publishing. And I've done my time at the keyboard, tapping out story after story while I learned how to write and market, and tried to figure out where in the wide world of fiction my writing best fits.

For months now, I've been standing on the edge of that nest looking out at the wider world, hesitating to take that final step into the air, to make a leap of faith, spread my wings, and fly solo for a while. I was afraid of stepping out, afraid of letting go of the familiar and striking out on my own.

But if I want to live up to my own potential, I can't be afraid anymore. I can't stay in the nest.

To put it another way, we all go through the crawl-walk-run stages in everything we do. I spent the first nearly seven years of my fiction-writing career in discovery (the crawl stage): How do I write fiction? How do I write fiction that appeals to readers and not just to me and my editor? How do I choose which stories to write? What genre should I focus on? What are the best forms of marketing for me?  And so on.

Now it's time for me to stand up and walk on my own, taking what I learned from crawling and turning it into the kind of career I want.

I'm not a fully mature writer yet. More like a prepubescent teen. I still have a long way to go and a lot to learn, about craft and story, about the business end of things, about reaching readers. From those same authors even! I still have milestones I haven't reached, in stories published, in income, in silly things that matter to no one but me, like recognition by peers and readers.

But for now, I'm done crawling. I need to let go of my mentors' digital hands and strike out on my own for a while. I need to move forward and discover what kind of writer I can truly be. To do that, I have to take that final leap out of the nest into the air where the only support is my own wings.

Growth isn't easy and it's not always fun, but it's always necessary. Right now, I need to move away from these unofficial mentors for a while. Once I've done some exploring on my own and figured out how I fit into the world of publishing, I can come back to the teachings of these authors, look at them with fresh eyes, and grow some more.

It's all growing, if you're doing it right.