Today’s Bout of Impostor Syndrome

I feel like SUCH an impostor today.  I can’t work on the novel, because it’s what I’ll be workshopping at Viable Paradise in October, and I’ll probably need to change a thousand things about it, so why keep working on that when I’ll just have to rewrite (or shelve) it later?  

A short story I’ve been working on is plotted, but I can’t seem to actually make it work.  Some of my “ideas in reserve” aren’t jelling, so I’m having a hard time doing anything with them.  

My OTHER novel-in-progress is frozen, because I’ve convinced myself that the synopsis makes little sense, and also because I need to do more background work before I can tell a story there.  My OTHER other series idea is frozen, because even though I’ve been working on it off-and-on for more than 15 years now, it’s remarkably similar to a currently-published book series (which I had never read until long after creating my own), and while I think it can still be made to work, I need to think on it so it doesn’t get any more derivative in appearance. 

I am terrified that what I will discover at VP is that I have the ability to write prose, but that I will never be an author because I can’t seem to generate ideas in quite the quantity that I need to.  Most everything I think of seems like it couldn’t really be even a short story.  

Yep.  Frustrated.  

Published by Michael R. Johnston

Father of an eighth grader, high school English teacher, writer. Fifty years old and feeling almost every bit of it on some days, and not a bit of it on others. Based in Sacramento, California, USA

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