A dialogue with a demon

I had a bit of a wobble last week. By wobble I mean a visit from my old friend the anxiety demon. He brought some friends and they had a loud party in my head. It was most unpleasant.

Unsurprising though. Whilst I was launching the Split Worlds project I was also writing the first book, and could hide away in another world. When I finished it, the real world was here waiting for me, along with all of its emails. The anxiety demons were upset at having been ignored for so long and made their protests more loudly just to be certain I got the message.

Yeah, thanks guys.

So it's been a rough few days, and in the spirit of this blog, I'm writing about the ugly warty bits of this writing life as well as the utterly wonderful bits. It started to get a bit better when I started to have a conversation with the anxiety instead of just trying to ignore it, and it's hard to remember this stuff once I've moved past it, so that's why I'm here, pressing it onto the page.

The golden rule of anxiety

After many years of wrestling with these beastly bouts of ick, I've come to realise that I can usually, eventually, trace it all to one immutable fact:

The anxiety is trying to protect me.

That's really hard to remember when it's making me feel sick, keeps me awake at night, makes me burst into tears in coffee shops or have minor panic attacks in supermarkets. It feels so intensely awful, it's really hard to hold onto the idea that some deep part of me is trying to keep me safe.

The thing is, life is pretty scary for me. I wasn't always like this, but some unpleasant things happened and pretty much destroyed my confidence. I've rebuilt it as best as I can, and there are some situations in which I am absolutely fine. Sitting in my office writing books and stories for instance, I have that pretty much sorted now.

It's when I need to step out of the good old comfort zone that things get ugly, and a big part of my unconscious mind wants to keep me safe, so it scares the hell out of me to stop me from going where it feels uncomfortable.

It can be really insidious, it's a crafty little bugger. Sometimes I even believe it's me thinking these things, until I realise it is only a part of me; a frightened, insecure and child-like part that is terrified of failure and rejection. Which is not good for a writing career, I can tell you.

This is where the conversation thing comes in. When the anxiety is raging, the hardest thing to do is just sit quietly and turn inwards. I just want to read, role play, watch films, play Skyrim – escape! All that does at the worst times though is keep the anxiety bubbling away on the back stove, and then it boils over as soon as I stop distracting myself.

I stopped and talked to it last week. I acknowledged that fact that I am terrified that the Split Worlds will not be well-received.

I acknowledged that this is the first project where I have really, really fought to make happen, the first thing in my life that I have put absolutely all of my skills into and the first large scale (for me) creative project that I could really publicly fail at.

That's all very, very scary stuff.

I asked the anxiety what it was most afraid of. Gradually, the answer surfaced:

If the Split Worlds fails, I'll never have another chance to devote my life to writing books.

It's that simple. That's all I want to do, so it makes sense that after working hard for years and years to craft my life into the shape it is now, the risk of losing it would be scary. But you know what? When I acknowledged that, I felt better. I realised that all I can do is my best. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether people love the Split Worlds or not is beyond my control, all I can do is try to make as many people aware of it as possible, without being grotesquely annoying. And if it doesn't work, if I don't keep my investor happy and can't do a project like this again, well, I'll survive.

The Split Worlds project is forcing me to go to hard places

For this to be a success, I need to promote it, there's no getting away from that fact. I hate, hate, hate promotion! I constantly worry about being pushy and annoying (I see a lot of authors doing that on Twitter and I really don't want to be one of them) and so I lean the other way and say far too little. I hasten to add that if you are reading this and worrying that it's you, it's likely that it's not. For you even to worry that automatically means you're not the kind of person to blast out a tweet to your book twenty times a day and say nothing else or have any conversations. If you are doing that… um… that's not what Twitter is about.

I know, intellectually, that there is a happy medium to be found, but I am struggling to work out what that is as I know my instinct to stay quiet is probably more my anxious self trying to keep me safe, so I am doing my best to negotiate with it, and not bother the hell out of people by going on about the Split Worlds.

Am I striking the right balance so far?

It seems to me that I can't trust how I feel about this, and you guys are the ones I worry about, so do you think I am overdoing it? My hope is that because every time I tweet and actively promote the Split Worlds there is a story for people to enjoy for free, it isn't as offensive as other messages like "BUY MY BOOK!" in the Twitter stream (every five minutes) can be. Or am I overcompensating and not doing enough?

Can I sound any more insecure? Urgh, I'm sorry. I'll go and put the kettle on.