The Terrible and Most Monstrous Thing about Writing by Julie Butcher

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by each experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do. --Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) American columnist, lecturer and humanitarian.

As writers, whether you're published or a beginner with their first 3 pages, we all deal with fear every ding-dong day. Rejections, queries, agents, (not you Deidre) reviewers, and pitches make our stomachs curl into tight balls of anxiety. Like a house of horror we’re filled with little rooms where—out of the blue—monsters jump and grab. Ugly gore-dripping specters tell us we’ll never get an agent. An evil presence whispers how no matter how hard we work, we won’t be good enough. Reviewers with zombie faces and knives for fingers slice and dice our books and we feel each cutting word.
Fear blows. It can paralyze you into inaction—you don’t write, you can’t read, and you avoid your inbox because it might have a review or a rejection. Worse, you never try at all. Failure blows too. Overwhelming fear that stops you cold will make you fail.

You remember the old story about the zombie chasing a group of men? In order to succeed, you needn’t out-run all of the men, just the slowest one. The same is true in writing. If you don’t have an agent, your book doesn’t have to be better than all of the NYT Bestsellers; (although I’m sure that would be lovely) it has to be better than the people on your level, the other writers who want agents. Angst over reviewers will only slow down writing the newest book. Fear of pitching an agent just makes you stutter and turn interesting colors.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. --Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) American Writer.

So the next time a monster jumps out at you, smack it in the head with your pumpkin full of candy and get back to work. You can do it.

Happy Halloween!