Tag: imposter syndrome

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brain monkeys

Sometimes, inspiration is hard to come by, and the imposter syndrome looms large. As I stare into this year with a big move on the immediate horizon and the terrifying prospect of searching for literary representation battling my desire to take my writing career in a forward direction (versus just going with what I know is safe but nowhere near as satisfying), it would be easy to let it all overwhelm me.

I do my damndest to write every day, even if the words suck. Even if it’s only a hundred words or so. Every word written is a weapon against the dark.

As I was writing the Epilogue to the third Blood Witch book over the holidays, I was struck with the notion that there was more to the story, that this trilogy was actually a quartet. So, I started on book four.

As of right now, the plot is a bit nebulous: I know where it begins and I know where it ends, but the middle part remains something of a mystery.

I’ve never been a writer who plots it all out with an outline and all. I mostly let my characters tell me where the story goes, so I’m sometimes surprised.

I’ve been a bit paralyzed by fear in the search for representation. I know these books are kind of in a niche within a niche, which makes it harder, and I know that agents get a ridiculous number of queries, so no answer is not a comment on my work, but that does nothing to quiet the monkeys in my brain.

I think I’ve decided to wait to query anyone else until after the move. In the meantime, I will continue pouring words into book 4, and polishing books 2 & 3. I am pretty happy with book 1 and all of the plot editing is done for 2 & 3, at least until an editor gets their hands on them.

So, here’s to a Tuesday in January of 2022. May it be amazing, Readers, and filled with kindness.

Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash

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the fear of success

As an author, you have to get used to rejection. I’ve gotten enough “no thank you” emails and letters to have adapted pretty well to them. And despite the fact that I approach every single submission with heart-palpitations and great trepidation (and no small amount of imposter syndrome), I’ve come to realize something about that feeling.

It isn’t about rejection. Instead, it’s a fear of success. It’s the fear of “what if”…what if they want to see the full manuscript? What if this agent wants to sign me? What if this editor wants to help me polish the rough edges? What if this publisher actually wants to publish this book?

There’s a fear that comes with the hope that this time someone on the receiving end of that submittal is going to take you from the pile and pass you down the pipeline…and all that comes after it.

I don’t necessarily write to sell books. I mean, if they sell, that’s great, but for me it is about the story telling, about the journey I’m able to take with these characters, in this world I built out of images in my head and the words I use to describe them.

Sometimes a rejection is just a reason to take a good look at the work and find the places that need polish. I guess the same holds true for a rejection that doesn’t come in the form of an email or letter, but rather it rides on the back of silence. When an agent or editor or publisher doesn’t even bother to respond. That is its own form of rejection.

It stings a little more, maybe, but I get it. These people must look at hundreds of books in a year. They don’t have time to hold the hands of the people who didn’t make the cut.

I got one of those non-reply rejections this week. I only know because I happened to see a tweet from the agency I submitted to stating that they had cleared out their to-be-read pile and were declining to extend an offer to any of them.

I guess that’s as good as I can expect in today’s climate. It means I need to dive back into the work of querying, but it’s also affording me a chance to revisit my draft, smooth out some corners, build in some back story that becomes necessary for the sequels and make the book stronger and better.

Not that it doesn’t sting. It does. But there’s no better medicine than dropping myself back into the world I created and sticking my hands back into the mess.

So I now have all three Blood Witch stories in a single file so I can make sure that the continuity issues and plot holes get sorted out and filled in and the trilogy can become a cohesive whole.

That’s how I’m spending my long weekend, Readers. That and laundry. Because there is always laundry.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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of confidence and validation

I don’t know that I can pinpoint an exact catalyst for becoming a writer. It seems that I’ve been creating and telling stories my whole life. I do know that the idea that I could write actual books with my name on the covers came in my teens.

It didn’t start with books, obviously. First came poetry. Oh my, was it some terrible poetry! It was trite and sappy or it was trite and dark. I guess it was the primary outlet of my teenage angst.

From there, I dipped my toe into the ocean of short story writing. I was at least marginally better at that, as it was essentially what I’d already been doing without actually writing stuff down.

It was inevitable, however, that I would turn to full length novels. I wrote my first one longhand on notebook pages. It was awful. It was derivative of every movie I had ever seen and every book I had ever read and I tried to cram so very much plot into it that there were inevitably huge holes and forgotten lines. My characters were either stereotypes or wooden.

Still, this is the book that bit me. I let friends read it, and, friends being friends, they all loved it and clamored for more. It was my freshman year of high school, and my notebooks and pages got handed around school.

I got my first typewriter for Christmas that year. I banged away at that thing every single day for hours at a time. First, I typed up that first book. Then I got started on a sequel. During my sophomore year of high school, I would type up around ten pages or so each night. Those pages got clipped together and numbered, because in the morning I was passing the “chapters” around to those who were reading it, and I gathered them back together again at the end of the day.

It was my first real taste of what it was like to write for an audience. I still have some of those stories around here somewhere. That second was still awful, but it was awful in completely different ways than the first, so that was progress I suppose.

Today I’m still fairly sure some of my writing is awful and I struggle with imposter syndrome a great deal (as I’m sure all writers do at some point), but I try to hold onto the confidence of that teenager, handing out pages to her peers in search of any scrap of validation and the confirmation that this is what I was meant to be.

Happy Friday, Readers! I hope you have a grand weekend.

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imposter syndrome

Do you know what imposter syndrome is?  I don’t know a single creative who isn’t plagued by it at some point in their career, if not through their whole career. I am no different.

It usually hits about now, when I have submitted a book to an editor and I’m waiting for the return.  There’s this voice in the back of my head that starts whispering that this is it, this is the moment when everyone finds out that I’m a hack, that I can’t write my way out of a paper bag, my plots recycled, my characters flat.

This is it.  This is where it all ends.

Of course, it doesn’t actually end here.  In a week or so I’ll get my edits back with things I need to fix and notes on character or plot, along with notes of cheerleading from my editor and lots of exclamation marks around how much she loved it.

That will placate the voices for a while, until I’m ready to turn it in for publishing.  Then it all comes flooding back and it can be crippling.  This is when that voice accusing me of being an imposter is joined by all of those voices that show me the lack of external validation…”You can’t even get reviews on the first two, what makes you think anyone wants to read your drivel?”

Is it any wonder that creatives are such fragile creatures sometimes?

Lest you think that it’s just in my creative writing I suffer this madness, know that just this month I received a raise in my day job that puts me at a level I’ve never expected to reach, and still, at least twice a week I’m struck with absolute terror that they’re going to realize I’m just posing, that I don’t know what I’m doing (despite the evidence to the contrary) and put me out on the street.

The only cure I know is to just keep going, which is why I’m eight pages into the seventh chapter of my next book.  It feels good to be writing a new story in a new world and a different style.

Take that, voices.