Inspiration and fear

No one has asked me about my inspirations for writing/blogging, but theoretically it is a question that someone could ask.

I think not many people know that I occasionally write write. That’s probably because (a) I historically haven’t done it very often and (b) I don’t talk to many people about it. My cohort did bring it up on Geek Gab, but that’s about the extent of any organizational dissemination.

I was just thinking about this because of a Twitter thread that wandered into my timeline this morning.

To the extent that writing is difficult, it is entirely a self-inflicted obstacle.

— Nate F'n Cassandra (@brainfertilizer) July 6, 2017

Fear.
The same fear that kept me from trying to finish it using the hotel business center computer on June 30th.

— Nate F'n Cassandra (@brainfertilizer) July 6, 2017

Time to find out where on the scale of "Suck" to "Masterpiece" this story lies.

— Nate F'n Cassandra (@brainfertilizer) July 6, 2017

This is the internal dialogue of literally every writer.

— redemily (@Emily30Red) July 6, 2017

“Suckers – I’m not afraid of writing!” I thought glibly to myself at first. But putting aside the fact that I’m not sure I qualify as a real writer, I think actually this “fear” translates differently for different people.

When writing is literally your job and you’re living and eating off book or story sales, there must be some degree of anxiety. What if the Muse starts playing hard to get? What if I just can’t cut it? Well, guess I’m eating wood pulp.

For my part, and I suspect this isn’t an uncommon sentiment, I experience more of a periodic sense of minor hopelessness; especially since hitting gold with the older SFF authors. I read Howard, Vance, Burroughs, now Brackett, and I think to myself – how in the nine circles am I going to write anything even approaching as good as this?

The answer, I suspect, is by reading and writing. A lot. Well, becoming a big name Scientifiction writer has never been a serious life aspiration for me, so I’m not worrying too much about it. Maybe that’s another reason why I don’t “fear” in the same way as others.

Blogging has really been more of a passion, and a more immediately realizable ambition for me. I’ve name-dropped Cirsova’s blog and Jeffro enough times by now that if you’re a regular reader you should be familiar with them as two of my major influences.

(By the way – Jeffro’s Appendix N book is finally out in physical copy. Go have a look!)

Since before that, though, I’ve always appreciated writers who are both technically proficient and mechanically interesting to read. Tycho over at Penny Arcade is one such. He’s obviously a very intelligent individual filled with all kinds of book learnin’. And yet his voice is full of quirk and his writing often drips with a sort of eldritch tang. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but reading his posts makes me want to write.

There’s an old, dead blog called the Sneeze. The Internet has imbued its corpus with a sort of divine incorruptibility. But the guy who ran it – a certain Steve – he was another one who made me want to blog. It’s harder than it looks, being able to write both intelligently and conversationally without coming off as a fucking dunce.

I hope someday to master that skill.

-Bushi