That old familiar fear...

In my quest to finish SERA, my wip, I have decided to fully reread everything I've written for it to date. This includes my handwritten notes and chapters, each chapter on my laptop, and all the outlines I've drawn up to date.
When I started writing SERA, I decided to create each chapter as a separate word doc, so that when I want to navigate through the story I'm not dealing with 300 pages to sift through. This has been extremely helpful, not only in the drafting stage, because placement of each of the plot points is much easier to visualize for me; but also will hopefully be helpful in the revising stage, as I will be able to look at each chapter individually, moving them around within the full text as needed with no more effort than a change in the table of contents.

As I began my first real read-through of all the chapters in order (which is a totally different experience than reading them piecemeal - an effort for which I'm generally rewarded with hours of self-doubt and insecurity), I fell in love all over again. The places came back to me with such intensity, I felt as if I had been travelling away from home for far too long. The characters struck me with their different personalities; some I hadn't really though of in months were there on the page and in my mind's eye: beautiful, weak, hateful, disgusting, powerful.

I read and felt a sense of both wonder and pride that, although I am faced with mountains of revision and I am nowhere near ready for the much-needed edit, I created this world and these people. It amazed and saddened me that these characters don't yet exist for anyone but me. The pride lasted precisely three seconds (ok, maybe I'm ballparking it, but still it wasn't very long) before the fear took over. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach and my hands started sweating.

That old familiar fear, the paralyzing, creativity-sapping fear that no one will ever read my story, or love my characters or feel about this as much as I do took over. I went from euphoric creator to doubt-riddled writer in three seconds.

Do you ever feel that old, familiar fear?

One of a Million

There's a difference between being one in a million and one of a million. Today, I'm feeling like the latter.

After reading a blog post about feeling like a fraud as a writer (and the fear that everyone else will recognize your lack of talent) and then another about writing buddies and their importance in the process, I feel like I totally missed the boat here. I haven't even taken a creative writing course since my first university degree, for Heaven's sake! Who am I to think that I will write a "readable" book?

Ok, maybe I'm just suffering from the self-doubt that is apparently just part and parcel of being an author. I was actually up last night, (not just because of 3 month old Thing #3) wondering when exactly do I get to call myself an author, and not just a writer? Is it when I have an agent, a contract, a book in print? Is it when I have a finished product, a totally revised manuscript ready for queries?

I'm sure it cannot be now, as I create, destroy, and recreate daily in order to make something Real out of my imagination.