I’ve not been doing well with keeping up with either writing or revising the past couple weeks, more so than usual. This isn’t because I’m not wanting to; I’m quite happy with where the novel is going, and I really want to get a short story revised to submit for an anthology, as well as submitting another short when I can figure out the best place to try. It’s also not any sort of writer’s block/creativity block/whatever you want to call it.
It’s a big, huge, ginormous whopping case of impostor syndrome.
I have this issue normally, but going to World Fantasy sort of exacerbated it. The previously mentioned stories and novel don’t help. The novel is in draft number I-don’t-know, and I so far have two rejections for one of the shorts. All that combined makes me feel like I shouldn’t bother going to a con like WFC, and that I have absolutely no business even trying to talk to agents or editors.
Rob, good as his intentions were, didn’t help much. He kept pushing me to include, when introducing myself, that I’ve been proofreading the last several issues of Analog. His reasoning–it’s something more on my resume. And yes, I understand that, and to an extent agree, but like I told him over the weekend, I don’t want copyediting to be how people know me. I consider myself a writer first. The other factor that didn’t help was that Rob seemed to continually forget that my main reason for being there was the writing, and the project we’re working on jointly is secondary for me.
WFC ended up being a huge drain on me because it’s so much more a networking con than any other that we’ve attended, and that really pushed at my introversion. Noise overstimulation also seemed to be a much bigger factor, too, to the point where I couldn’t stay in a room with a party, big or small, because the noise was overwhelming and stabby. I couldn’t stay in the bar area, where most everyone was, for too long for the same noise overstimulation reason.
Combine that all together, and I felt incredibly out of my element, and want to do little else other than curl into a ball and lose myself in a book. But I would be doing a disservice to myself if I let this keep me from writing. I love my stories, and each time I go back to read through to remind myself of the story, I get excited about finishing it and wanting to share.
