Kim Neville

For a while now I’ve been pushing myself beyond my fears, because I’ve always had a lot of them and I’ve found that every time I face one my life gets a little better. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes:

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.

We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

I believe this. Following my fear has always steered me in the right direction. I’m afraid of fewer things. I feel stronger and more confident than I ever imagined was possible twenty years ago.

Lately, my intuition has been urging me to take the “do what scares you” advice quite literally.

I’m thinking about writing a horror novel. This is weird for many reasons, but mainly because I’m a huge wuss. I have a lot of nightmares. I mean a lot. Even thinking about my story idea makes me kind of jumpy.

But you know how it is when an idea takes root. You can’t just shake it off. It grows. So while one side of my brain keeps coming up with reasons not to write a horror novel, the other side is happily watering the little sprout and building a trellis for it to climb. And I find myself telling everyone I know that my next project is a ghost story.

But…but I don’t write scary stories.

But the nightmares.

But dead babies and stuff. What will my mother think?

My fears seem to have no power over this idea. If it weren’t for the fact that I promised myself I’d finish the first draft of my current novel-in-progress by the end of March, I’d be neck deep in research on post-partum depression and a fifty year-old murder case.

Nope, all my worries only make me want to spend more time nurturing my ghost story seedling. So, why not? The worst that could happen is I find out I’m not a horror writer. And I can’t help but wonder if all those nightmares are trying to tell me something, that maybe their cure is in releasing those fears onto the page. Guess I’ll find out.

The photo above captures an important moment — my little girl taking her first big leap without a hand to hold on to. I took it a year and a half ago and it’s still one of my favourites. It’s also my inspiration for this weekend.

I’m heading to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference tomorrow. SiWC is three days of workshops with well-known authors, agents and editors. This isn’t my first time attending, but it’s the first time I’ve gone with a finished novel under my belt, and that means I have to do something new. Something I dread. I have to pitch.

For readers unfamiliar with pitch sessions, some writing conferences offer attendees a chance to sit down with a literary agent or an editor for a few minutes and talk about their novels. Plenty of writers have met their future agents at conferences. It’s a great opportunity. And I’m totally freaked out.

I’m doing it anyway, obviously. I’d be crazy not to give it shot. But in case I need a confidence boost, I wanted to remind myself of a couple things:

Once upon a time…

…I was too scared to read my fiction out loud to a group.

…I was too scared to submit a story for publication.

…I was too scared to share my work with others.

…I was too scared to finish a short story.

…I was too scared to even try writing words down on a page.

Looking back now it seems strange, being afraid of those things. But I was, and I only got over my fears by being scared and going for it anyway.

So, here I go. Don’t worry, it’s going to be fun and afterwards I’ll be glad I did it. And I was thinking, maybe I’d invite you to take a leap of your own. You know, if you happen to be reading this and there’s something you want to do but you’re scared? Whatever it is, I bet you can do it. If you need a little help, take my hand. We can jump together.

This is not one of those excuse posts, where I tell you how busy I’ve been over the last three months, and list all the things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, and make empty promises about being more regular in the future.

I’m a bad blogger. And you know what? I’m okay with that.

Late last year I started thinking a lot about this blog and why I was writing it. What’s my purpose? Who’s my audience? How can I develop a following? I read some stuff about blogging, and writer’s websites, and the more I read and the more I thought about it, the more unsure I became. I started to worry. There are so many online journals out there. Why should anyone care about mine? A blog needs focus. It needs to offer value to its readers. Am I irrelevant? Worse, am I boring?

All that fretting made my posts more and more self-conscious. It made blogging…not fun. So I stopped.

But the thing is, I missed it. Also, it bothered me that I’d analyzed my words to the point of rendering myself mute. That’s not a happy place for a writer to be.

I used to be good at keeping a written journal. I have a box full of them, as a matter of fact. They’re embarrassing but I keep them around, because besides being helpful for clarifying one’s thoughts, journals are also physical evidence of one’s evolution. It’s comforting to look back and see that I HAVE grown over the years. I AM actually wiser.

I don’t journal much anymore, but I have this blog. Sometimes I talk about writing, and sometimes I talk about my family. There are photos and stories here that remind me of small but beautiful moments in my life; moments that make me smile. Most importantly, this blog tracks my journey as a writer. It reminds me how far I’ve come on the days that I berate myself for not having come far enough.

What I’ve decided is that there’s value in documenting what I’ve learned about writing. Putting those lessons into words helps me understand them better. Posting them here, where others can read them, forces me to think my ideas through more fully and present them concisely. While I’m sure there are nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout my written journals, I’d have to slog through a lot of whining, run-on sentences and dream chronicles in order to find them. I like the idea of being able to access them here, whenever I want.

And if my learning experiences happen to be helpful to others, well, that would make me very happy. So if you come here and find something that resonates with you, I would like to know about it. It’s always reassuring to know that you’re not alone. But if my words don’t interest you at all, that’s okay too. Because, to be completely honest, it’s not really about you.

The pumpkins are carved, candy purchased and princess costume assembled. We are ready, and officially the happiest Halloween house in Vancouver. Ghosts, skeletons, witches, zombies, bats, really big spiders, black cats and jack-o-lanterns with non-happy faces are all on the scary list this year. So in lieu of black and orange, we’ve decorated our house with white fairy lights and glittery stars. Our living room is now a sparkly princess hideaway, a sanctuary for three year-olds who think Halloween is ugly and weird.

Happy Halloween to everyone, both lovers of the dark and those who prefer the light.