I've been watching the Olympics and I especially enjoy the in-depth video interviews of athletes recorded before the games started. I'm impressed with the regimen these giants follow, the nutrition, the workouts, the consistent dailyness of their preparation. 

Many wannabe writers are similarly dedicated. Their stories also inspire me: mothers of kids rising at 4 am to get those 500 words into the computer before the kids go to school and she goes to the office. Those who struggle through the slap-in-the-face of rejection after rejection: I'm encouraged when I find out that Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) sent his first manuscript off many times, only to have it rejected. If he hadn't continued, we would never have read, "To Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street,"as well as the dozens of other books that followed! J.K. Rowling, actually on welfare awhile, writing about Hogwarts and its students, polishing, revising, visualizing, sending it off and getting it back, rejected, not once but several times! (Those publishers are kicking themselves at this point.)

So where do you get the discipline to keep going? Does it come from within? Do you have an encourager? What keeps you writing and hoping for publication? Maybe it boils down to how bad you want it!