Fear

What scares you?

It still boggles my mind that, six months ago, I was still just this fledgling writer, obsessively submitting manuscripts and waiting on acceptance letters that just weren't coming, and now I've got one book out, two more coming out before the end of this year, and one newly accepted. Four books. Seriously?? FOUR books? Does my editor have me confused with someone else? Perhaps someone who knows what they're doing? Or does she see potential in my words that others (sometimes even myself) do not? And now that the stories have made it through the editor's initial inspection, what will the readers think? How will they react? Will they love my characters as much as I do, or will they hate them, and flame them to their friends so everyone finds out that I'm a great big fraud? Or, worse...what if they think the story is terrible and they sound off in the reviews about how bad it is...and what if I start to believe them?

The whole purpose of this post is to announce the sale of my new story. It's the third book in my Stories of Us series: a m/m erotic horror piece called Last Friday Night. Now, ordinarily as a writer, I don't let my insecurities get the best of me. I mean, in this business, I can't; I'd never finish another book if I did. But for the purposes of this post, I'm going to let my demons out for a little bit to breathe, because this book is about fear. It's got nothing to do with things that go bump in the night, or the creepy crawlies that always seem to find us no matter where we are, or even the unknown that lurks just outside of our realm of vision. The fears that my heroes have to face in this book are the fears that mold their very beings. They're the fears that literally paralyze you the second you even think about thinking about them. And it's those fears that it's nearly impossible to conquer.

To be honest, if anyone asked, I could tell them the inspiration behind every book I've written thus far except this one. I have no idea where this story came from. I know that my heroes, Tyler Mack and Jessie Nalick, both showed up on the page for the first time in another story I'm still working on, and that when I watched Burlesque last year, I came up with a totally different story for them. But when I sat down to work on this one, the words just poured from me as if the story was already told and I wasn't doing anything more than writing it down. Honestly, it took me less than a month to write it. I've never written anything that fast before that wasn't on a deadline. But once I was done and going through a round of self-edits, I started thinking to myself: what am I really afraid of? And if I was forced to confront those fears head on as Tyler and Jessie do in this story, could I do it? Could anyone?

What about you? What are you afraid of? And how do you get past that fear?