The road to completing a manuscript can be long and lonely—especially if you’re a midlife writer like myself who has toiled away at short stories, novellas, and novels over a long period of time without any of those works being traditionally published. For those not interested in self-publishing, we often hope that our time as unpublished writers will be short-lived and that once we’ve completed that breathtaking manuscript, it will be acquired by an agent and then by a publisher, even if it’s for a modest advance.