Happy Insecure Writer’s Support Day, Everyone! I completely forgot about last month’s post. I blame all the March action. The trip to Costa Rica was a whirlwind, wonderful adventure with my daughter, then there were school projects and events, and well, April came and went. April also brought new additions to the Town’s End.

Meet Oso Inu. We adopted him from the Human Society April 26th, a two-month-old mixed-breed squirming bundle of chewing energy. Oso was the name the Humane Society gave him, which in Japanese is a greeting like “Hey!” or “Yo!” (In Korean, my mother-in-law says, it means “come here.”) And he got the name Inu, because I name all my dogs Inu (which means Dog in Japanese). Therefore Oso Inu translates to “Hey Dog!” which suits him. He’s small enough still that he can’t reach the guinea pigs, and young enough to learn they aren’t chew toys. He’s rated as a medium dog, so somewhere up to 44lbs, they’re estimating. And he’ll have my husband for company during the day.

But what does that have to be with being an insecure writer? Well, it begs the question, will I be able to focus with all this cuteness? (Actually, he sleeps a lot still, so he’s perfectly fine with crashing on the bed next to me while I type.) In truth, focus isn’t the issue. I’m changing my plan, and that has me worried.

At the beginning of the year, I reassessed all the scenes and events of book 1, sound-boarded off my sis-in-law, and set up a spreadsheet with the scenes that’d get me to The End. Now that I’ve written the first quarter of the book, I revisited the plan because things deviated. And looking at what I had in mind… I didn’t like it. It was too messy, too all-over-the-place, too unfocused. (I guess focus really is the issue, huh?) So I made major changes to the plan, cut and rearranged, and while I have a tightly coupled timeline now, I wonder if it’ll play out correctly because of the movements. Won’t know until I finish, though.

IWSG Question of the Month – Some common fears writers share are rejection, failure, success, and lack of talent or ability. What are your greatest fears as a writer? How do you manage them?

Honestly, the biggest fear I have as a writer is that I won’t finish my series before I die. For one, I’ve started over on book 1. For another, I don’t even know what the plot of book 5 is other than “the good guys fight and defeat the big bad in the final showdown.” And when I don’t have an idea of what I’m doing, I tend to take a while. But my grandparents both lived into their 90s, so maybe I’ve got a good 50 years to finish this.

Any new additions to your life? How do you handle major plan changes? What are your fears?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.