DANGER: Pointless whinging and moaning, next 50 miles

Writing again. I'm discovering I have very little faith in my ability to write fiction. With nonfiction (especially if it's a bit goofy), I feel like I'm on fairly solid ground. But coming up with stories where one builds all the rules of the place from the ground up ("forging worlds" is how a friend put it recently) -- well, it can be terrifying. The one thing I don't want to do is waste people's time with a trite, poorly-written idea, and unfortunately much of the time I see my own concepts for stories as obvious and boring.

Yeah, it's not going very well tonight. Can you tell?

I dunno, maybe some of it has to do with attempting to be creative on a deadline. But I've been sitting on the next segment of Unseen for about a year now, and nobody's holding a sword over my head on that one. It's just fear of screwing things up that keeps me from moving on with it. I know it's a stupid reason to stop. It's also my most frequent writing problem.

Also not entirely thrilled with the experience of submitting fiction to publishers, since I've been riding an unbroken wave of rejections lately. There comes a point when you start asking yourself whether you're up to collecting yet another form letter explaining that "your story wasn't right for our publication" (parse that as "it sucked").

Well, maybe it's time to take that writers' workshop I was considering at the beginning of the year. It couldn't possibly make my writing any worse.

Taking the Surface out to write on the front porch of my mom's house. This house is set on the hillside of Y Mountain, and from the porch you can see most of the valley spread out below you, glowing with lights. The sliver of moon has already set behind the Oquirrh Mountains, and tonight the crickets are out in force. Finally cool and pleasant now, long after sunset and moonset.

I'll write something worth reading eventually. It's got to come. If I just keep typing it'll have to show up, right?