Writing is scary.
I wonder sometimes if we authors admit that enough.
Finishing a series gives me knots of anxiety in my stomach,
and stress-dreams, and fresh fear about the next project that looms. Because
they always LOOM, you know? Deadlines loom. New things cast shadows in my mind,
shadows of doubt about capability to finish, to pull it off, to deliver.
Maybe that isn’t so different from other things in life, but
it feels like a microcosm of life in the sense that I’m always starting and
finishing these big, emotional journeys with the books, and it’s exhilarating
and exhausting in equal measure.
I’ve started work on the sequel to A Gift of Poison in
earnest now that I’ve finished revisions on In Dawn and Darkness. This is scary
for me because I really, really love the characters in AGoP in a way that’s
very personal, because I’ve carried them in my mind for a long time (I wrote
the first draft of that book about 10 years ago). I want to do right by them by
giving them a good story. By really telling the story well.
I have to do some mental coaching to psyche myself up for it
at times. I talk myself to the cliff, and then I talk myself into jumping. And
I have to write the parachute.
It. Is. Scary.
I think a big piece of the fear is facing my own thoughts
about things, and another piece is the way the story changes as it takes shape
on paper. I want it to be GOOD. I worry it won’t be. That I’ll write it the
end, and the whole thing will collapse on itself. I always have the fear of “what
if I can’t finish?"
It's like I have to keep proving each time that I can and I will.
With writing, as with man things, the only way out is
through.
