Story Worms: Biting the Bullet

Despite being a huge horror fan, I’m scared of a lot of things. The dark, spiders, flying, food with a face. In fact, simply leaving the house each day can feel like a test of courage. There’s just all sort of things that can go wrong, or cause a moment of awkwardness, and I can’t prepare for them all.

But when you’re a self-publishing author, you’re also running a business, and businesses require scary things like marketing and networking. We’re a funny lot, us writers. We hide away in darkened rooms, or basements, or under the eaves, sometimes in quiet corners of coffee shops and libraries if we’re particularly brave, and we spend much of our time talking to fictional characters, and living in fictional worlds. And that’s just how we like it, right? So it’s hardly surprising that social awkwardness tends to be rather prevalent among our numbers.

Last Saturday I attended a local speculative fiction literary convention. I’ve been going for a few years now, and I know a lot of people who go, and I spend the day hugging and chatting and catching up with everyone I’ve not seen for a year. But I remember my first time there. Not only did I have the anxiety of going somewhere new, with people I didn’t know, but I was set to read an excerpt from one of my short stories. The convention hosts several book launches, and the anthology the story was published in was being launched that weekend. It was absolutely terrifying. But I did it, and I’m so glad that I did.

That book launch got me recognition in that community, it made me friends in it, and it led me to what has happened today.

The one thing I always leave the convention with is ideas. Loads of them. Story ideas, project ideas, character ideas, and business ideas. Ways to push my self-publishing business forward.

I approached the event’s organiser (it actually took me 3 days to pluck up the courage to email him!) and pitched an idea I had for a workshop I wanted to run next year. And when he responded, it took me a while to pluck up the courage to open his email. Because this meant so much to me. But, with one eye squinted shut, I read his reply. Not only did he love my idea, but he asked me to bring it forward to the winter event, and he asked me to sit on one of the panel discussions.

Being on a panel discussion scares the absolute bejeezers out of me. I practically grew up on the stage, but I always had a script, a costume, a character to hide behind. This will be me. Unscripted. With a whole audience of people expecting me to say something clever and insightful. So I said yes. I bit the bullet. Because sometimes we have to do the thing that terrifies us the most.

And not just because it’s good for business. But because it’s good for us.