I think you should know a bit about me. That way you can feel quite confident about what you too might achieve if you see that an often quite thick, over-the-hill ex-pharmacy assistant can become an established writer and illustrator.

In primary school I loved:
Drawing and painting
Writing and reading
Making up plays and performing

In highschool I loved:
Art
English
Ancient History (although sadly Narnia was never covered in the curriculum)

So naturally my dad wanted me to be...........a vet.

Yep that's right and he still tells me occassionally to this day that I would have made a great vet.
Now to be fair I have always loved animals too but I am thinking my interests and talents lay fairly obviously in arts and literature.Well, really my parents just wanted me to live a comfortable life and they did not want me to be a starving artist or writer. So the phrase " I don't know what I want to do" became my mantra for the next few decades. Of course I had to fill in those decades somehow. I went to Uni and did Theatre Production, I did hairdressing, worked in bakeries, sold insurance (warning this work can destroy a soul), worked in a drycleaners ( I got fired from there- beat that people) and mostly worked as a phamacy assistant. I was a single mum for a while and did housecleaning ( obviously a highlight, those years). Blah, blah, blah. The whole time I wrote journals, poetry, did the odd drawing and painting. All these years I was often unhappy. I have to say that at one point a guy I lived with agreed to me working part-time so I could be creative at home. In all honesty most of the time I just sat there. I didn't know what to do. I made some nice muffins.
Luckily my mum always encouraged me by annoying me with requests for artwork. My grandfather wrote a few books about his life. My brother got me some mural jobs and I'd met a lovely guy who was happy for me to get creative whenever. Trust me I knew to marry that one.
I found I had all these stories bubbling out of me. I wrote them down. I had images in my head for the pictures to them or movie-like images for the adult fiction.
But I was still working part-time in work I wasn't enjoying. I had a family, a home and pets that all needed attending to (never ever buy chickens if you need some peace to work in). My creativity happened in the gaps between till one day I just couldn't ignore the misery inside me any more. I felt like I was going to explode if I didn't make my stories my main focus. And luckily there was no divorce and my family likes baked beans on toast. Well, it's not that simple and more about that later. But todays blog can be summed up thus:
If you have a creative child, please please please encourage them to persue that. I hear so many parents ask their creative teenagers what they will do for a real job and it breaks my heart. Creativity is a great gift however it is like a sword. You can use it and be a great warrior or unused it turns back on you.