Writing is a salad of tears, fears and beers

Fortunately I hate salad. Doesn’t make sense? Of course it doesn’t.

I sit here at the keyboard dealing with a huge ego and debilitated self-esteem. By definition those two should be mutually exclusive but in practice they are separate entities. What it boils down to is that I feel I should be a great writer, but don’t believe that I am. As every teacher I ever had would say, “I’m not living up to my potential.”

The worst thing is that it’s no longer mass-production educators looking at standardized tests defining my potential, it’s me. You always think you outgrow these sorts of things but you don’t. For your entire childhood the phrase is hammered into your head. It gets pretty stuck down in there.

So now I’m the one setting the target of potential and I pretty much suck at it. The worst thing is that I know that I have unrealistic expectations but can’t seem to lower the bar. On the other hand I have this fear that if I lower the bar too much I’ll become a veg.

It’s weird because at work, when I have such, I’m an expert at cutting big problems down to achievable chunks. However when it comes to real life, and especially my writing projects, I can never get past the enormity of a project.

As I work on my new novel I try to concentrate on the scene, but I find myself using the current scene to set up the next scene that I haven’t started yet. That’s not fair to the current scene at all. Dare I say, I’m not letting it live up to its potential.

So what’s my point? Actually I just realized that I’m having this bitch session to shield my new characters from all this negativity. I guess I’m afraid of hammering negative attitudes into their impressionable little personalities. I don’t want them to suffer as I do.