First of all, thank you for all of your lovely comments about my new cover.  I so appreciate it.  For those of you eager to hear about the saga of LauraPalooza, may I direct you to my guest post on Book Club Girl’s blog?  I post there about 5 things I learned at LauraPalooza and even include an enticing photograph of me in a bonnet as a young girl.  Oh, my.

So, speaking of scary things…I want to write about something very un-heroinely.  I want to write about fear.

I try to avoid the stereotype of the slovenly, absentminded and paralyzed as much as possible (ha ha ha), but when I think about fear and the writing/publication process, many a moment comes to mind.

• The fear of anyone else reading my writing because I worried it wasn’t good enough…The fear of sending off a query letter to the person who ended up being my agent and then the fear of actually speaking with him once he expressed interest in my work…The fear that I was headed nowhere after my first book died on the marketing table of several major houses and went the way of many a great book idea…The fear that my career was over before it had even begun and that my agent would dump me because he had invested approximately 52 billion hours into me and gotten exactly $0.00 in return…The fear that my new idea wasn’t good enough…The fear that my proposal wasn’t good enough (are you sensing a theme?)…The fear that nobody would buy it, even when we had OFFERS ON THE TABLE…The fear that the contract would get jacked up due to factors beyond anyone’s control (not sure where this one came from)…The fear that I couldn’t write something book length that anyone but a mother would love…The fear of the editorial process…The fear of the copyediting process…The fear of the sales meeting happening and somehow being a disaster even though it had jack to do with me and I would never hear about its outcome…The fear that I would hate my cover or that it would somehow hate me…The fear that the Laura Ingalls Wilder fans would hate me…

ET CETERA, ET AL. I could list these events and moments ad infinitum, forever and ever, amen.  I cite them now because I really thought maybe I was getting over this constant fear thing, and then I faced…The Author Questionnaire.  This is a document you need to fill out to populate your author site with great juicy content for your hordes of admiring fans.  It also is The Harbinger of Fear!  For example:  it asks questions like “what is your best quality?”

Um.

Cue crickets and agog look of utter foolish muteness.  Repeat 100 times.

The thing about fear, at least my flavor of fear, is that it’s not really rational so it doesn’t do to say “oh, be brave!” or “it will pass!”  Imaginative people like to imagine byzantine and complex doomsday scenarios, and I am no different.  I’m really, really good at creating a mental landscape that is even barer than Jane Eyre’s moor, over which I must drag my wrecked, shattered body with not a soul or friend to comfort me.  Can you tell that melodrama plays a part in my fears?  Mm-hmm.

There is good news, however.  Despite fear rearing its melodramatic head, I remembered the lessons of my own book (holy cow) when faced with that blinking cursor, my old companion. For a split second, I thought about Jo March running in to see Mr. Lawrence and of Jane never flinching when Pilot growled and of Anne Shirley valiantly sailing to her near-death as the stricken Elaine…and I bucked up and filled out the survey.  That looks really, really anticlimactic, but I think it’s important for writers to talk about the ugly side of this process, the fear of the unknown and the weirdness that can occasionally strike even when All Your Dreams Have Come True.  And, just to bring everything full circle, one of the things that draws me back to my favorite heroines and authors again and again is my curiosity to see just how they’ll face fear in their lives, fictitious or real.

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