Writing Revisited

Every so often I like to remind myself (and thus, my readers) that I fancy myself a writer. That is, until I came upon a tweet that went something like this: "A writer is too afraid of failure that he never finishes anything is not a writer..."

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Mr. Kellen, if you look a it that way, you are too a writer. You've written stuff, even if it isn't very popular..."

And that's true, since I have finished some stuff (you can find it here and here), there are a number of unfinished projects that I'm sitting on for a variety of excuses (don't have the time, can't think of how to end something, etc.) and those might all be good and valid, but it can't help but make me think: am I afraid of failing?

Again, I point to my first finished work and say, I submitted it to publishers, agents, and the like, with little to no success (I had one whole agency pass it around to every agent before telling me every single one took a pass on it). So I have finished something and made the attempt to get it published traditionally before going the e-distribution route. But, what after that?

I swore up and down that A Plague Upon Thee was going to be different, that it was a unique idea that no one else in the world would think up. Yeah, you can read how I feel about my chances now here. Part of that, I would say, is that I sat on the manuscript for too long. I finished the second draft in early '10, but I always meant to go through and polish it up before submitting it to publishers and agents.

So...is that it. Is my early rejection leading to a fear of failure and therefor, a fear to even complete something so that I won't be rejected again? Not saying it is a certainty, just something to think about...