Fear of Success?

I always thought that was a ridiculous phrase. To be honest though, success isn’t something I’ve had to worry about. That is, until recently, when I started promoting myself as a writer. The usage of my website, http://tomflanders.com, has tripled over the last few months. People are finding me on Facebook and Myspace. My Twitter fiction short story is slowly gaining readers. This is all great but now what?

One of the symptoms of fear of success is the worry of maintaining a flow of new work. That became very real this morning when I realized that I didn’t have a blog post ready for today. My first reaction was, oh well, I’ll skip a day. Then the raised-a-Catholic guilt kicked in and I realized that I had an obligation to my faithful readers. Of course that sort of hubris is equally unacceptable. I settled on posting so that I can maintain my search engine indexing rank, which is a technically valid point.

So here I find myself, following my ambition of laziness, working towards tossing off the shackles of work for a life of literary leisure, laying about the house throwing together the occasional creative masterpiece, now faced with the prospect of having to write 250 words each and every day with the sole purpose of keeping my name on people’s radar. Is this what I signed up for?

Of course it is. When I extract myself from my expectations I see that this is what I wanted without knowing what I wanted. My brain often hides such insights from me. The form of my ambition is to be a writer. The essence of that ambition is to have people read what I write. So this fear of success isn’t so much about that fear of the mechanics of producing work. It’s a deeper fear that I may not be as good a writer as I’d like to believe. The fear that the readers whose attention I’ve caught will tire of me and wander away.

Is anyone actually reading this?