In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* Overcoming Fear, a history
* Ugh. Admin Stuff
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“If you don’t believe in yourself, why is anyone else going to believe in you?” Tom Brady in 1440 Daily Digest
“Let’s talk, you and I.
Let’s talk about fear.” Stephen King, opening words of the Foreword to Night Shift (1978, Armchair)
Dr. Mardy continues. “A little more than two decades later, fellow horror writer Peter Straub wrote about these two brief sentences:
“’With its deliberate repetition of the first two words, its gliding but insistent rhythm, and its movement from the colloquial contraction of ‘let’s’ to the abrupt shock of the final noun, this flourish is literary to the core.’” as reported in Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week (see Of Interest)
Overcoming Fear
Life is all about overcoming fear. Every success begins with that one act.
Near the very beginning, if you don’t overcome fear of failure (and falling), you’ll never take your first steps as a toddler.
Lacking the encouragement of your parents and your own comparisons of yourself with your fellow would-be toddlers, the easiest thing would be to remain in your comfort zone and on four legs and crawl to wherever you want to go.
As frustrating as it is, life is chock full of such beginnings.
Again vis the dual channels of encouragement and comparison, you are finally able to let go of Mom’s hand and go hesitantly into your first day of school.
Sometime later, you repeat the process to move into junior high school, then high school, and then trade school (do those still exist?) and college.
Or your first job. Or opening your first business.
And each step of the way, if you’re fortunate, each success lends more belief in yourself and self-confidence and the next challenge is a little easier.
Or that’s the way it’s supposed to work, and sometimes it does. For awhile.
I’m fortunate to have known folks who have taken a deep breath and overcome fear at (almost) every stage of their life. As a result, they persevered:
- they earned an associates degree, or a bachelors, or an MA or MS or MFA or evern a doctorate at college, or
- they completed a career in the military, or
- they built a successful business, or
- all of the above and whatever else.
Yet those same folks falter at the frightening prospect of:
a blank sheet of paper or a blank document on a computer screen.
Well, it probably isn’t completely blank. Maybe they wrote a working title at the top and their name beneath the title.
But then they freeze solid with their old nemesis: fear. What next?
My advice is “Do what you did every time before: take a deep breath and plunge in.”
Yep, I’m talking again about writing into the dark. I’m talking about drawing on the same self-confidence and belief in yourself that you’ve successfully drawn on so many times before in order to attain your goals.
As Nike so aptly put it in the famous ad, Just Do It.
In the end, it really is all up to you. You’ve been wildly successful at so many things in your life: Are you really going to let a blank sheet of paper be your downfall?
Ugh. Admin Stuff
I enjoy letting folks read my short fiction free over at https://stanbroughwrites.substack.com/. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, check it out. I have about 3 times as many subscribers over there as I do for TNDJ. Go figure.
But of course, I have to post each story over there too. Yesterday, I realized “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” was the last story I’d scheduled to post. Oops.
Those stories publish only once a week, so I post them in advance, and then the weeks fly by and I lose track.
Yesterday, I realized I had no pre-sheduled stories remaining. So I took a couple of hours. It isn’t always about taking a deep breath and making a start. After that, it’s a matter of perseverance, of muddling through.
So I opened the substack site in one window and a folder that contains some of my short fiction in another window. Then I went back and forth, back and forth, searching for each title to see whether I’d already posted it.
A couple of hours later, I’d found, opened, copied, pasted, and scheduled for release 21 short stories on the site. The first, “The Last Amarillo Raid,” is derived from one of my Wes Crowley books. I scheduled that one for next Friday, August 9.
Most of the others are stand-alone short stories. Now they’re scheduled for release on successive Fridays from next week through December 27. The last story in the stack is one of my personal favorites. It’s titled “Draped Like Muga Silk.”
All of which got me thinking: Those of you who are writing a short story every week for the Bradbury Challenge—whether or not you’re submitting the title, word count, and genre to me—why not open your own Substack and publish them every week too?
I mean, if you’re sending them off to paying markets, exhaust that possibility first. But when your rights revert, you can still post them to a substack and let the whole world read them. (If the publisher doesn’t or won’t revert your rights, don’t publish with them.)
A substack is one more way to get your name out there, one more way to showcase your fiction-writing chops and maybe even introduce readers to your novels. Just a thought.
But if you do that, I strongly recommend you keep track somewhere of what you posted and when you posted it (year, month, and date). It’ll save you a lot of trouble down the line.
If you’re smart and you’re already keeping a spreadsheet of your short fiction, you know, with at least the
- title,
- date written,
- word count,
- genre,
- date submitted (if submitted plus the name of the publication and date accepted or rejected), and
- date self-published
it’s easy enough to add one more column to show the date you put the story up on your substack.
Sigh. I didn’t do that. So now I need to go back through all the stories I’ve published to Substack and note the title and what day they went live.
At least that’ll give me some idea which stories I have left to put up there without repeating any (or without repeating anymore).
Be smart. Learn from my mistake.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week “Overcoming Fear”
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 1100
Writing of Blackwell Ops 27: Sam Gentry
Day 1…… 3004 words. To date…… 3004
Fiction for August…………………….….… 3004
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 474408
Fiction since October 1………………… 735054
Nonfiction for August……………………… 4530
Nonfiction for 2024……………………… 251540
2024 consumable words………………… 683537
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 11
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)……………… 93
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 241
Short story collections…………………… 29
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing are lies, and they will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
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