{"id":20155,"date":"2013-08-27T03:00:13","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T07:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=20155"},"modified":"2013-08-27T14:23:53","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T18:23:53","slug":"the-fear-never-gets-any-easier-by-tom-pollock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2013\/08\/27\/the-fear-never-gets-any-easier-by-tom-pollock\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fear Never Gets Any Easier, By Tom Pollock"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s a guest post by author Tom Pollock, who wrote the fantastic City’s Son<\/strong><\/span><\/a> (and who was kind enough to blurb Under the Empyrean Sky). Here Tom talks about the fear all authors experience, and it’s a short but powerful horse-kick of a read. He nails it.<\/em><\/p>\n

The truth about the fear is: it never gets any easier.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s March 2013<\/strong>\u00a0– I feel like I have a herd of specially miniaturized buffalo stampeding through my lower bowel and I\u2019m sweating enough that if this writing gig doesn\u2019t work out I could probably get a job as a water feature at Buckingham Palace. My finger\u2019s hovering uncertainly over the return key on my laptop, pointlessly so, because I\u2019ve already hit it, and even though I want to, I know there\u2019s no way I can take the email I\u2019ve just sent back.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve sent in the last round of edits on The Glass Republic, <\/em>the sequel to The City\u2019s Son,\u00a0 <\/em>which just enough people read and liked to mean that there\u2019s a readership to piss off and disappoint if I\u2019ve fucked this up. The book\u2019s off to the printer\u2019s tomorrow. That\u2019s it. No more changes. It is now, officially TOO LATE.\u00a0 In my head, I can hear the typeset falling with the ominous thud of a coffin lid. This is the first time I\u2019ve ever been in this situation with a book already out, and yet the sensation is eerily familiar. In fact this feels almost exactly like it did back in\u2026<\/p>\n

August 2012\u00a0<\/strong>– I\u2019m sitting at my computer, furiously hitting refresh on Twitter as The City\u2019s Son <\/em>is about to break like a glorious, urban fantastical wave over the literary world. Anyone who has tried to talk to me for the past week has received a spew of hyperactive and incomprehensible mumbling in response, and I appear to have wholly lost the ability to hold objects in my hands.\u00a0 It\u2019s been a year of eighty hour weeks, sleepless nights, and my fianc\u00e9e pointedly referring to my book as \u2018the other woman,\u2019 and laying an empty place for it at the dinner table, a brilliant rhetorical tactic only slightly undermined by the fact she has to tell me about it on the phone, because I\u2019m not at home having dinner because I\u2019m writing my fucking book.<\/em><\/p>\n

It all comes down to this. What if everyone hates it? Worse, what if no one reads <\/em>it? Worse, what if they do<\/em> read it, but simultaneously misconstrue and read too much into it and come away convinced that I derive sexual kicks from getting butt-naked except for a Nixon mask and choking the life from innocent penguins? No, you\u2019re right, no-one reading it would be way worse.<\/p>\n

GODSFUCKINGDAMMIT WHY WON\u2019T TWITTER LOAD?\u00a0 I haven\u2019t been this stressed since\u2026<\/p>\n

March 2009 – <\/strong>I\u2019m sitting at my keyboard. The return key is still pressed under my index finger, and I know with a sickening certainty that no matter how slowly I lift my digit, even if I leave it there for ever and get catheterised and never leave my seat, it won\u2019t get un-pressed again. There\u2019s no getting that email back – \u00a0the email that contains my query and \u00a0the first three chapters of my novel. \u00a0And even though in reality, \u00a0if this agent rejects it, and the one after her, and the one after him, it won\u2019t make the book any less worth writing; \u00a0won\u2019t make it any less<\/em> a story I needed to tell, right now it feels like it would. I\u2019ve spent a year and a half telling myself I can do this, and I\u2019m terrified of finding out I was wrong.<\/p>\n

It never gets less scary, I don\u2019t expect it to any more. Also, I try not to let the fact that it never gets easier fool me into thinking it was ever really hard<\/em> in the first place. Being a soldier is hard, being a miner is hard, being bloody nurse <\/em>is fucking hard, and sure, being a writer can be hard too, but mostly it\u2019s the \u201c Particularly Fiendish Sudoku\u201d kind of hard, rather than the \u201cI have to stick a catheter in this guy, then turn around\u00a0 and get up to my elbow in this other guy\u2019s turd-canal, and then<\/em> tell this guy he isn\u2019t going to be around to see his daughter\u2019s fifth birthday before heading home for three hours sleep before coming in to do it all again tomorrow\u201d kind of hard.<\/p>\n

Everything\u2019s relative, and nothing worth doing is ever easy, and there are a million other things I could be doing, and so every now and then the question naturally arises: \u201cIf it never gets any easier, why carry on?\u201d<\/p>\n

For you, maybe it\u2019s necessity, maybe your life, or your livelihood or your sanity really do depend on putting one word in front of another, in which case, like the soldier and the sailor and the nurse before\u00a0 you, go forth and do what you do<\/em>. Godspeed to you. Power to your pen.<\/p>\n

But if you\u2019re like me? If it isn\u2019t <\/em>necessary, if you could be doing something else? Well then, I guess all you can do is smile maniacally at the backwards \u2018QWERTY\u2019 the keyboard raised in bloody bruising the last time you smashed your forehead into it, because apart from necessity, there\u2019s only one other answer to \u2018why carry on?\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u2018Because it\u2019s worth it.\u2019\u00a0 And it is, I mean it really <\/em>is.<\/p>\n

What if<\/em> I\u2019ve forgotten how? What if the last one was a fluke? What if it doesn\u2019t come, and still doesn\u2019t come tomorrow, and again the day after that? What if I can\u2019t What if I can\u2019t What if I can\u2019t?<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s August 2013 <\/strong>and with a friendly herd of miniature buffalo thundering their way towards my colon, I sit down to write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a guest post by author Tom Pollock, who wrote the fantastic City’s Son (and who was kind enough to blurb Under the Empyrean Sky). Here Tom talks about the fear all authors experience, and it’s a short but powerful horse-kick of a read. He nails it. The truth about the fear is: it never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20155","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-5f5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20155"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20227,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20155\/revisions\/20227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}