Fear of Failure

I went out to the library today and got a few hundred words done for Undead and Inhuman.  I got home and told myself that I had to keep going forward, but I didn't really want to.  The truth is that I don't like my book.  I've got sixty or seventy pages, and I pretty much hate every bit of it.  It's a war story when I don't know how the military really runs.  The details seen very flimsy a lot of the times.

I told a friend of mine tonight that maybe writing a novel just isn't in the cards for me.  I just felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into despair.  I felt like giving up on the story.  But then I sat back and thought, "If I do stop this book, what's to keep me from flaking out on the next one?  Or the one after that?"

I probably have moments like these daily.  Actually, that's not a probably.  I do have them daily, in spite of all the tips I can offer about increasing word count and plotting a story.  There are a lot of times when the idea of writing a book seems so pathetic and ludicrous that it's hardly worth getting up in the morning.

Finally, I told my friend, "Fuck it.  I'm going to keep going with it.  I'll keep going with the first draft.  And if it ends up being a complete failure in the end, at least no one can say that I didn't try my best with it."

One of my favorite sayings is, "You know you're going to fail if you don't try."  If failing is the goal, then not trying is the best way to do it.  Hell, I'd kick ass at being a failure.  But I'm not trying to be a failure.  I'm trying to write my damn novel.  The only way to do that is to keep going, keep writing, even when I'm saying out loud, "This is a crock of shit."