When you choose a profession (or a profession chooses you) there’s generally a straightforward path to follow. This is true in principal and strictly true to some professions more than others. This may also be decreasingly true over the last century as more and more skills are considered transferable and knowledge is regarded as more fluid.
But one profession that has shown little change in how the layman can enter it is writing: especially fiction writing. It seems to be purposely mired in the same archaic fog-of-war system that it was two centuries past. When you read books (or blogs) on how to get published, the frequency of contradictory information increases with each source. The only thing that remains consistent is the query letter: beyond that, it’s a craps-shoot where, even if you knew where you threw the dice, you can’t read them because a) it’s too dark and b) they don’t have dots or numbers, but alien symbols instead. Sometimes they aren’t even dice after throwing them: they could turn into doves and fly away.