Believe it or not, this child may have a cure for your fear.
You would think that when the Kickstarter for my novel surged past its initial goal in just a few days, I would have been elated. You’d think that I would have been ecstatic at the thought of being able to publish my novel with all the expenses covered and over 100 pre-orders within the first 72 hours.
But you know, the first thing I felt was fear.
Uh-oh. What if people don’t like it?
What if people snicker about it behind my back?
What if one of my supporters reads it and thinks it was a waste of money?
Fear has a way of asking a lot of questions without letting you think long enough about the answers.
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I’ve been thinking quite a lot these days about a conversation I had with the wise Kelly Chripczuk a few months ago, pretty soon after I got out of the hospital. I’m not sure what rabbit trail took us to this concept, but I remember Kelly saying something along the lines of this:
“It’s important to see your calling as fun. Because then it doesn’t matter what other people think.”
We can’t do the things we’re called to do in order to please others. We have to do these things because we can’t NOT do them. We have to do these things because, when we’re doing them, we feel like a child again, a child playing, having fun, being creative.
I am continually reminding myself of that these days. This novel was so much fun to create, to write, even to revise. It’s a story that I really hope you enjoy, but more than that it was a story I loved writing, a story I didn’t want to say good-bye to.
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What are you afraid of doing? Would it help if you simply allowed yourself to do that thing out of a sense of fun and enjoyment without any care of what other people think?
Would it help if you could be a little kid again, at the back of the church, conducting the entire choir?
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You can still support my Kickstarter campaign HERE. We’re trying to reach some pretty cool stretch goals. Check it out.