To A 26 Year Old Me,

Before we get to the post proper, I must remind myself to make a post soon about the fact that I succeeded in getting into the university I wanted most, and that I'm moving there in 3 days!

Okay, here is the post proper (copied and pasted from tumblr because I wrote it there first):


september 4, 2012 - july 21, 2020
I’ve just struck a deal with my friend—or rather a bet, or a goal, because there’s no exchange coming out of it—in which we agree that we will have each sold at least 1 novel by the age of 26.
This isn’t a deal concerning publishing — you don’t need to be published to sell 1 novel (we’re talking about just one here, not as in multiple copies of one story — just one novel); this is more an incentive to have completed something, to have completed it to a standard where we’d be content with somebody reading it from front to back.
26 for both of us is 8 years away which is actually plenty of time. 26 in my head seems a lot sooner than it really is, but it is considerably far away. So it would be plain embarrassing not to have completed something fully by that age.
I have asked him to cement the deal/bet/goal in some way, and I’ve decided to also post this tumblr post by way of confirmation (although it’s likely I’ll have abandoned tumblr sometime in the next 8 years… though I hope not to delete it, just so I have some archives of Self to look through). 
So this is that. By July 21 2020 (my friend’s 26th birthday), we both will have sold to any person (or people, if we get lucky) at least 1 novel of a quality that we are content with.

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