by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published July 2006 in IROSF

A funny thing can happen to writers on the way to the post office.  We become afraid of what we can do.  People freeze up in all sorts of ways — cat waxing, rejectomancy, pathological revision, drunkenness, sheer wall-eyed panic.  Some folks talk about fear of failure, but if we truly feared failure, we wouldn’t be writers.  Writers are those people who’ve mastered failure, gotten very good at it even, and kept on pluggi...