My friend Kaye Draper has been participating in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group for quite some time. I’ve been meaning to as well, but I was afraid of what people would think.

*cough*

Right about now, I’m dealing with that dumbest of fears, the fear of success. I’m about to release a short story into the wild as an ebook. It’s a market I’ve not sold in before (while The Remembrance was available as an ebook, I did not market it as such), but one that I’m both excited and terrified to get into. Also, it’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve released anything. Of course I’m afraid that no one will read it, and that the ones that do will hate it. What I did not expect was to be terrified that it will take off.

What if my blog gets hammered with traffic, and then the server crashes, and then nobody can get to my site and I look like an unprofessional hack? What if I get this sudden influx of money and forget to set aside enough for taxes? What if people love it and then expect me to keep at it, or worse, get better? What if the fun of writing turns into work and then I want to stop? What if the inspiration well dries up? (That will never happen, I have more ideas than time in which to write them.) What if someone had the same idea and tries to sue me? What if my writing somehow causes a societal revolution in which millions of people are killed and I am remembered in infamy for the rest of time?

*cough*

These fears are actively trying to keep me from clicking on those publish buttons. I have to think that many writers experience these contradictory fears – don’t put your writing out there, you might fail! Don’t put your writing out there, you might succeed!

Screw you, brain. I’m putting my writing out there.

From my writing journal on 22 June…

–

UNICORN!

…and then Nikki says, “It’s not like you could have them just…” She throws her hand up in the air. “…stumble across a unicorn in the middle of the road!”

My eyes go wide, the cheese stick trembles in my hand, still connected to the bite in my mouth by strands of Parmesan. “Why NOT?!”

Diane has fallen asleep, and dreams of a unicorn. Because it’s Diane, she muses over its meaning as a symbol alongside experiencing the dream. It looks at her, going tense and alert, and then the car screeches to a halt, jolting her awake. Standing in the road in front of them is a unicorn.

People get out, approach it, making it nervous and defensive. It will gore the bajeezus out of some people before they start to figure out how to deal with it. Diane will be an expert in unicorn mythology, and hilarity will ensue.

From my writing journal on 20 and 22 June…

—

Okay, so I’m unsure about writing the bit about aliens. It’s longer and more involved than what I want to  do at this point. I want strange, and I want reality breaking, but I don’t yet want it on that scale.

I do want strangeness. I do want something that will give them pause. I want it to be lethal enough to take out one or two of the caravan, but I don’t want the whole group threatened with death again so soon after the Locusts.

I really did like the cheese factor of 1950’s flying saucers, little green men, pew-pew lasers, and Old Man McCrazyPants. Maybe it’ll work somewhere else in the story, or somewhere in another story.

Nikki was right about the blood tentacle monster hiding on the floating piece of road. Too out there, too Hentai/Kubrick for this early in the book. I do like the idea of floating roadway chunks, though.

Maybe instead of a meditation gone awry, they could be caused by the loosening of the rules of physics. Gravity no worky. It’d still be working in town, which the caravan would discover, depending on how close to the town their journey takes them. As the group nears the hovering chunks of concrete and rebar, they’ll fall into place and seal themselves back to where they’re supposed to be. Their speed of falling will very, and could trap one or two survivors underneath.

The town would be ringed by the floating islands of doom (mini doom?), and would consider themselves trapped by it. If the caravan goes through town proper, they’ll notice that chunks have torn themselves free behind them, but will fall once again if they approach.

Perhaps the pieces of concrete are in concentric circles. Each new piece would have raised as gravity held less sway. It would make sense that it would be a geographically specific thinning of that particular law of physics. So, soon after it begins, small rocks of pavement rise. Then, the effect increases, the area sans gravity widens, and more concrete rises to reflect the new area. Since the center is already hovering it is surrounded by a new ring of pavement, making a whole, wider circular slab hovering seven or eight feet above ground level.

Nikki pointed out that driving over the pavement after it crashes back to earth would be next to impossible. The sealing back up solves that problem, but it also implies that someone is directing reality, whether consciously or subconsciously. The point of this scene is loosening reality because nobody is there to control it, not another human causing this to happen.

Son of a crap.

I wrote this as I came upon a stumbling point in the Remembrance rewrite…

—

Okay, the alien thing isn’t going to work. None of the martial artists have the ability to attack from a distance, and no matter how cheesy it gets, the little green men aren’t going to land and let the humans beat the snot out of them. They’re perfectly happy zapping people from above, thank you very much.

I could start Sebastian’s change early. Have him launch a fireball by coughing it up like a cat does a hairball. But the Guardians don’t do fireballs, they do lightning, and it would be a hell of an abrupt thing to do right away. Not exactly gradual. So, yeah, don’t like that idea, either.

Should they win? Can they simply defend until Old Man McCrazypants gets zapped by his own Martians? Should they be completely overwhelmed by this new threat, losing people simply because they have no way to fight back,, and then the attack will stop, for no reason that they could discern, cranking up the helpless vibe? Will it alienate the reader to have so much happening outside the range of the characters’ ability to control and/or understand? We don’t even have the Merlin/Moiraine/Morpheus teacher/mentor/rescuer type of character to reassure the reader that SOMEONE knows what’s happening, even if the POV character is totally lost and has no bleedin’ clue.

Goddamnit.