ISWG - A Little Late

On the first Wednesday of every month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group encourages writers to talk about their insecurities. Except I totally forgot this month, even though I had the post written and everything. So here we go.

 

So I haven't done one of these posts in a while, because I haven't been insecure at all!

(yeah... I wouldn't believe that, either. In reality, I've been busy and didn't have any insecurities that I wanted to take the time to whine write about. :D Although Circuits & Slippers is being published on September 29, so I am really happy.)

Insecurity #1

I've finished editing my first real novel, and I'm going to be doing #PitMad tomorrow, which is where authors tweet about their novels and agents and publishers can "like" them to request more information. Need I say more?

(update: I got 2 likes!)


Insecurity #2

My brain is so exhausted and I don't feel like I'll ever write anything good again. I know I will, because I've had this feeling before, but somehow that doesn't help.

Insecurity #3

People I know are reading my work.

This is a big one for me, and the reason why I almost used a pseudonym. For the most part, no one I know has read my work since I was 14 and my stories were about a talking mouse that went on adventures. Now my stories are complicated. Dark sometimes.

One character is kind of suicidal. Others are (spoiler alert for my aunt if you're still reading FreakShow:) having affairs. A lot of them swear way more than I do.

Obviously, the characters are not me, but there's just enough of me in these characters that even I wonder how much of them is a conscious decision and how much is just my mind going "hey, look - a chance to work out our feelings about our father!"

If I wonder that, what will other people think? Will they believe me when I say I was never as depressed as Petra? That I don't actually have as dirty a mind as Lily and that her promiscuity was a surprise to me?

I send warnings along with my stories sometimes. Simple as "there's violence in this chapter" to long explanations about the origin of the characters so they understand my intentions. I think I do this because the people I'm sending it to - aunts, grandparents, friends of the family - have known me all my life. I don't want to worry them about my mental health or when they see how seriously messed up my characters are, or think I'm hiding things from them in any way.

I feel like this post should end with a moral like "talk to your family about these icky feelings" or something.

Instead, here's a picture I found on my computer but don't remember drawing! It appears to be a cat gazing out at a universe for some reason.

 

 

(obligatory ad for Circuits & Slippers: Like sci-fi? Like fairy tale retellings? You can sign up for an electronic advance reader copy of Circuits & Slippers here!)