I'm afraid to be good. Afraid to write well. It's a ridiculous, ludicrous statement. I hear you saying, What? You're afraid of what? It doesn't make any sense. Yes, it doesn't. It's that luminous cusp between an amateurish philandering with words and the mastery of language, that point when you can sense you're getting better, but you're not quite there. Yet. And the pressure to get there fast is insurmountable. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It holds me back, this fear, it's unexplainable and debilitating and degrading. I don't feel like I can talk about this to anyone, it fills me with shame and self-loathing, especially because it's new and puzzling.

Where did this fear come from?

Something happened today. Something amazing. It doesn't necessarily guarantee that my 3rd novel, IRKADURA, will somehow be touched by a stroke of genius, though, funny enough, in the moment when this epiphany struck me, it felt like it. To me. Hahaha. Right. Secret reprehensible hopes. Like that will ever happen. Maybe. I don't know. In the meantime. Let me keep being decorous and continue with our conversation.

Something struck me today. Wait. I'm lying. It struck me yesterday. Well, a bit today, too. Like an aftershock. Two things happened. One, I read this article about Irish writer Eimear McBride (beautiful name, right?) whose first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 10 years after she finished it, published after 10 years of rejections. (10 years!) In this article Eimear said that after reading Ulysses she thought, "...everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else." Naturally, I went to Amazon and started reading the preview of the book, you know, the opening, the first pages. And that. Was. It.

The fear of writing well

Why writing rules don't matter