Can Failure Be Avoided?

Of late I've been freaking out. I'm scared to death my book is going to sink, people are going to laugh at me and I'll have to slink away to hide in the shadows of the blogosphere. I also am afraid I'm not going to be able to write a decent follow up book to Finding Meara.
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In other words, I'm scared I'm going to fail.

"Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out." Benjamin Franklin

Thanks, Ben. Part of me seized when I read this quote. Does he mean me, right now? Am I going to know failure? But then I caught on to how freeing it can be to embrace failure. Sure, we'll all know failure at some time, which means we might as well get on with it all. If we fail, we just do something different next time. No biggie.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill

Excellent point, Winston. Even if we do succeed once, there is no guarantee that we won't ever fail again. And no one is going to take away our respective birthdays if we do fail. In the grand scheme of things, at least for me, the stakes of writing aren't all that high. My ego is at risk, but that's about all.

"Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure." Confucius

The courage to continue on and keep moving forward becomes the previous preparation Confucius is talking about. We get better, we learn new things and can try different methods to accomplish that for which we are working so hard.

So I guess the answer is no, the option of failure can not be avoided.  But we need to be courageous and try, anyway. Otherwise, it's guaranteed we will never experience success.

How do you handle the fear of failure?