Overcoming Fear

The other night I had a dream that I decided to self published my novel on a whim, just to see what would happen. In the dream I started getting reviews-and they weren’t good. The 1 star reviews started to pile up, much to my horror. Luckily it was just a dream.

I think a lot of people share this kind of fear. There’s always that voice somewhere in the back of our heads telling us we aren’t good enough. No matter what praise we’re given, people tend to only focus on the negative. So how do we push through it and keep moving forward?

For me, I have to remind myself that giving up will get me nowhere. Successful authors are often the ones who kept trying even after hundreds of rejection letters and touch criticism. Sometimes that criticism even pushes them to work harder.

Ultimately, I love the characters and world I’ve created and I want to share that world with other people. That love is the driving force behind my quest for publication.

I want to know what pushes you to keep writing. What makes you write?  And how do you move forward in the face of adversity?

One of my first writing loves was, and is, poetry. I love the way a few simple words can be transformed into emotions, or entire words. But I'm also weirdly secretive about the poems I've written. The ones I'm happiest with are the ones that are the most personal and the most difficult to share. It seems silly to me, though, that I have hundreds of poems just sitting in notebooks that no one has ever read. So I figured I might share a few of them on here from time to time, just to brush the dust off of them and get them out in the open. So here we go...


Sometimes I Dream of Georgia

Sometimes I dream of Georgia.
Never thought that I would be
so haunted
by the tangled moss
hanging from those live oak trees.
And I never thought I'd miss her
or the warm Savannah sun.
Or the scent of Juniper
that hung in the coastal coves.
I'll never whistle dixie
or call myself a bell
but I can't forget her song
though I've bid her farwell
somehow she stays inside.
That place has never left me,
Sweet Gerogia, she is mine.