Blah blah blah

First of all I feel that I owe my very best friend in the whole wide world an apology, because I've been avoiding him.  Why?  I just sent him the first draft of the aforementioned vampire story and asked him to critique it.  Then I spent the next few days convincing myself I was busy, when really I just wanted to convince myself that I had never written anything and no one had ever read it.

I think I need to give a name to this problem.  Presentation Anxiety, how about?  It's like stage fright, only with the written word, instead of spoken.

So right now, having finally worked up the nerve to check my email, I feel pretty wretched.  Nausea is my chief emotion at the moment, a side affect of the anxiety.  I also feel a crushing doubt in my abilities as a writer, and a voice in my head is trying to convince me that I am not up to the challenge, that I should just keep these stupid little attempts at stories to myself and not try to do anything with them.  See, I don't write for enjoyment or ambition.  I write to keep my sanity.  So all that matters is that I write, right?  I can handle the world of the writer, but the world of readers is too big for me.

I am now telling that stupid little voice to shut up, because I can get over this.  I've heard everything I knew made that story suck, but I also heard the things I might have forgotten that made it good.  Right now the vampire plot feels a bit off - and I'm thinking "Why did it have to be vampires?  Seriously, where did that come from?  I don't even like vampires." - and it needs complete overhaul.  I might even nix it completely and go for a mundane plot.  Okay, probably not that; I'd get bored, not to mention that thwe whole story sprang from the first line, in which a vampire is essential.  So some hardcore reimagining.  (But seriously, why vampires?) 

Not to mention that the only scene in the story that seems to work and that I actually like (and my beta-bestie agrees) is a scene that has no vampires...

Ah well.  Here, have a metaphor.  It's like (okay, simile) a massive home improvement project.  You have to rearrange all the furniture and completely gut a room, and then fix whatever is wrong, and then you find other things going wrong and have to fix them, and then you make a mistake and have to fix that, and it's just so much work, you don't even know if it's worth it anymore.

Is it worth it to me?  I'm not going to answer that yet.  I'm just going to say that if I should give up any sort of publication aspiration, I should have a better reason than fear.