Lack of Eloquence

I've been battling a lot with fear. It's a passive aggressive fear that's been slowly eating away at my direction and forward motion. As a writer, no matter what what I'm doing whether it's writing, editing, outlining, brainstorming, or even deleting... I'm moving forward. But as of late, I'm stagnant.

I spend a lot of time working things out in my head before I put them on paper. But this method hasn't really worked for my fear problem yet, and maybe blogging will help.

Every writer thinks he/she is great or has the stuff to make it big. I do, and if I didn't then I wouldn't be trying. I'm a firm believer in the virtue of modesty, but I don't have any problems remembering what that is. I have a harder time remembering self confidence. I have to work hard at what I do. Sometimes, though, when I look at my writing on the screen I wonder if I couldn't have done better when I was in fifth grade. Seriously.

I guess it's not very marketable to whine. Maybe that's why when I look into writers' blogs I don't see them really talking about the hard times. Like the times before they were able to earn a solid paycheck doing what they love... writing.

I struggle for my writing, it has consumed (and will consume) so many of my days. And I want to share that.

There's that book HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU. The whole point to that book is that we are not the exception but the rule. And that works for writing too. J.K. Rowling got tons of rejections before she got a deal. And I'm not supposed to follow that or believe that will happen to me... cause she's the exception, I'm the rule.

Truth is, I'm tired of being afraid. I'm tired of trying to hold back what I'm going through and keeping a metaphorical smile on my face all the time for the internet. A lot of people use blogging as a tool to spread the word about publishing and writing skills, but there are already a lot of others like that out there. Honesty is probably my most obvious trait, and when it comes to writing, it might be my best. It's about time I used that to express the "writer experience" in a way few others do.

I'm also tired of believing that there are no exceptions. I'm not going to think my work is perfection, in fact, I accept I have so much to learn, but at the same time I'm not ruling out that........ I can be the exception.

Libba Bray, at the end of one of her Gemma Doyle series, references what she calls "The Perpetual Night of the I Suck Abyss". And I love that line. When I write, my days run together, and I have nothing good to say about it, probably because I'm half suffering from the delirium of not sleeping. Work gets done, but I can't wait to start a new piece. But, right now- it's Perpetual Night. And wading through the muck of perfecting a piece and finding an agent is getting tiresome. I'm not giving up, and I'm not complaining...overall it's a great journey. I'm just a little broken down, and I felt like writing about it. Anyone got an Amen to that?

Can I get an Amen?