The last two weeks have been crazy with work. My once part time job in which I worked two days a week for 5 hours a day or less is suddenly a five days a week, full day shift job. It’s because the store manager is on holidays and while the boss is away everyone seems to be looking to me to run the store and the massive mid-year sale set-up. I can understand why, I was a manager for 5 years sometimes running much busier stores, but I came back from maternity leave as a simple casual for a reason: to avoid this. This is the cause of my less-frequent posting, but not the cause of my nerves.
I’m nervous because I uploaded my first piece for critique with my writers group. I originally planned to post some of my very best work (the first chapters for Storybook Perfect if you were curious) but didn’t for two reasons. Number one is because I am struggling a bit with revision on Fanta’s story – something’s not clicking right, but I can’t pinpoint it (editing in tiny fragments of time is not helping me either) – and a critique of the early chapters might help me find what I’m missing. Reason number two is because what would I do if my ‘best work’ was torn to shreds?
I know I’m just being paranoid, I mean the work is pretty solid – those opening chapters were enough to get the first agent I approached to ask for my full manuscript, so they can’t be too crappy – but that doesn’t ease the fear that all writers have: that I’m just not good enough.
Funnily enough, even with that thought in the back of my head it doesn’t stop me from uploading other work for critique or from continuing to work on becoming a published author. Even if I worry I ‘might not be good enough’ I’m not going to give up, because you know what? If I’m not good enough now, what’s to say I can’t work hard and eventually be good enough – or better? Anyway, giving up just isn’t my style.