Having at least a few years of making a living from doing the creative work of my choice rather than having to work in jobs I dislike that are not of my choosing.
As a comic-reading boy, I imagined myself making a living as a comic artist. In my late teens, I imagined myself making a living from selling short stories. I've always been optimistic!
A good cover and title are second only to having reviews. A mediocre cover is better than no cover at all, but even a brilliant cover and title will not sell a lousy story!
Everybody has had the experience of lacking the motivation to do something creative. Writing is a bit like sex. You are likely to enjoy it most when you are happy, free of worries, and don't have other things on your mind! For writing (I'll leave the sex tips for now), my approach has always been to write either very early in the morning, or late at night. At these times, I am less likely to make excuses for not writing because of having other things to do. These times also tend to be quieter, so the outside world is less likely to impinge.
So far, I've only had two to read, and neither were where I needed them (Amazon). They were fair enough. Unfortunately, writing reviews has become an industry. What this means for the writer without a budget is a Catch 22 situation: if you don't have the money to buy them, you generally are not likely to get any. If you don't get any reviews, you are unlikely to sell books, and thus won't have the money to pay for reviews.
What inspired me to start writing fiction in my late teens was my interest in all things creative. Video was out of reach financially, and even still photography was often out of my reach in those pre-digital days. Traditional media art was usually within reach, and writing, which required nothing more than a pen and paper, was an art form I always had access to! Two things inspired me to start writing again after over three and a half decades: one was the realisation that I had many true-life experiences worth telling, the other was the discovery that self-publishing had become something I could hardly have even dreamed of in the 1980s.
