Me? I'm working harder than ever, taking personal and emotional risks, and having fun doing it. Yes, it's scary to take something you have created and expose it to the unmoderated criticism of the general public. But what's the alternative? To avoid it, and live the life unexamined? No thanks.
You need to remember that there's a lot of fear built in to any personal project: fear of criticism, fear of failure, fear of wasting your goddamn time when you could be doing so many other things with all of those hours spent locked away scribbling. But what else are you going to do with your idea, your project? Remember this too: most projects start out with fear; the fear of the blank page (or the White Room as Twyla Tharpe calls it) exists for a lot of people. It's real.
I've crossed this bridge before: I'm also an artist. Every time I finish a piece of work, I have to show it to people. Art is to be shared - in fact, art is to be given away. That's where it's value lies, in spreading ideas, and that's true of books too. Maybe you've never thought of your work as art before, but it's true. Perhaps your work is not what you would consider to be high art (Stephen King, an author I love dearly, described himself as the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries) but your work is art. It's your art. Shine a little light on it.
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