“What the Hell was I thinking?”

I’m in the middle of writing my second novel for Tor Books. (It’s not a sequel to All the Birds in the Sky, it’s actually Something Completely Different.) I haven’t actually worked on this book that much in the past couple months, because of short-story deadlines and book promo craziness.

But I’m right at the stage with this novel where I keep thinking about all the stuff I’ve decided to try and do in it, all the wild geese I’m trying to chase down, all the nutso ideas. And I keep clutching my head and asking, “What the Hell was I thinking?!”

It’s kind of terrifying and maddening, to be honest. I look at all the things that looked like good ideas when I first came up with them. I side-eye all of the stuff I fell in love with and absolutely had to have in my book at any cost. And I’m like, “This is all terrible and foolish and I’m a moron for thinking it could possibly work.”

This is totally normal though.

I had that same feeling, pretty much nonstop, for about two years while I was working on All the Birds in the Sky. And in the end, I was able to convince myself, along with an agent and an editor and a few other people, that my nutso ideas really did belong in a book together. (I’m still waiting on the edge of my seat to find out if I managed to convince everyone else who winds up reading the book!)

So part of my brain knows that the “What am I doing? This is a terrible idea” thing is normal and just part of the process. There’s a lotta leaps of faith that go into writing a book, after all, and some of those leaps start to feel kind of insane when you’re in mid air.

But at the same time, that doesn’t mean I want to ignore that voice of doubt inside me. Because it’s healthy to have doubts, and sometimes it turns out that some of the ideas I got madly infatuated with really don’t fit in my book. It’s part of the testing process: Which stuff actually stands up to “What the hell” test, and which stuff actually falls apart when you start asking. And sometimes… it all falls apart once you start having doubts, and you’re left with a godawful mess and you just have to light it on fire and walk away. That’s happened to me, plenty times.

I guess we’ll find out if this new novel is going to survive the doubting process, or turn into a noxious trash fire, in like two or three years. Here’s hoping!