Scary

Sometimes, writing for other people's eyes is just plain scary. It's not particularly difficult - it can't be technically more difficult than writing for myself. I rarely struggle to find something I want to say. At this point in my life, time is not an issue. Sometimes I don't write because I'm lazy, but mostly I don't write because I'm scared.

A small part of what I'm scared of is the vulnerability: I'm exposing a part of myself to the world to accept or reject. It's not that hard, though, to convince myself that nothing too terrible will happen to me. If somebody really hates me, the worst they can do is to flame me and have their comments deleted. It's not that likely to happen anyway.

What really scares me is testing my own mettle. I'm writing something that's meant to be of a reasonable quality. If it looks awful afterwards, I can't say it's because it was only for practice: if I let other people see something, it's coming out of the best of what I can do - it's not always the best I've done, but it's rarely if ever the worst.

By putting my writing where others can read it, I'm forced to acknowledge that I'm not about to write a bestseller, because I know my writing won't be that popular. I hope and believe that it's good enough that a few people will be interested enough to read it, but I have to admit that there will be only a few. It's good to squash those ideas before they get out of hand, but going out there and proving them wrong is a little scary.

Every time I write something for others, I take the risk that it'll be ignored, or that I'll offend somebody, or that I'll prove once and for all that I can't write. They're not very big risks, but sometimes my mind inflates them. More accurately, often my mind inflates them. I have to continually make the effort to take the risk. It's not a very big risk, but there's an adventure in every day that write something other people will see.