Happy Halloween, BtO readers! In honor of the day, I thought I'd spend a few moments reflecting on the fears that sometimes block our path. Not so much the legimate fears of the scary monsters of the writing business -- tough deadlines, fickle markets, and the ever-popular rejection -- but the subtle terrors that can take up residence in our subconscious and cause us to defeat ourselves. I'm talking in particular about fear of success. By it's very nature, Big Success is scary. It puts a writer out there in uncharted waters. It makes her visible in a way that modest, middle-of-the-pack achievement never can. It pushes her out of the safety of her current peer group and creates a profound shift in the way she will be viewed by friends and family. It tempts the gods to smite us (you've read your mythology, right?) and inspires our internal editor (vicious harpies though they are) to shriek, "Who do you think you are?" It also comes with larger risks, because no...
on the many-tentacled business of books