E.A. Brady

When you think of fear, what comes to mind? Scary movies? Walking in a strange place by yourself at night? Spiders?

I know this isn’t a usual post for a romance writer’s blog, but I’m more than a romance writer. I’m also a mom and wife and a friend and an athlete and a million other things to a million different people. (I know… I’m wicked popular! 🤣)

The one thing that I seem to carry with me from one role to another is my old friend, Fear.

As part of my word of the year introspection and growth, fear has come up quite a bit as of late, and I don’t like it one bit. It’s as if the Universe is putting it directly in my path again and again and saying, “It’s time to get a handle on this.”

While I definitely have a fear of spiders (and all other kinds of bugs!) the fear I’m talking about is more like the fear of failure.

The fear of rejection.

The fear of saying and doing the wrong thing.

All. The. Time.

You know what? It’s restrictive. And exhausting.

I recently attended an online writing retreat, and one of the workshop presenters stopped me in my tracks. It had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the seminar, which is why it hit me as hard as it did.

The woman introduced herself and gave a quick intro to her writing life, saying she started writing two years ago because she wanted to earn some extra money to help come up with the down payment on her house. So, she decided to write 50,000-word sweet romance novels and self-publish them.

Two years later she’s got twelve books published and she’s always working on more. I was literally gob-smacked. My first thought was, “You can just decide to write something and then publish it? Just like that? No worries about all the other s**t that goes along with writing? What the hell?”

I walked upstairs and shared my observations with my husband, who is really the greatest guy I know. And he just looked at me and said, “Well, if you don’t overthink everything you do, sure. That sounds doable.”

Come on!!!

Then, the other day I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts and the host was speaking about goals, and the importance of setting big goals, giant goals. He said, “But what if you fail?” He waited a beat and then followed up with, “Who gives a f**k if you fail? You only have one life. What else are you going to do with it?”

Again… come on!!!

I think it’s time to go about doing the work of letting some of those old fears go. I think it’s about time to start having the “who gives a f**k if you fail” mindset. I think it’s time to start letting some of my work out into the world.

Onwards and upwards, as they say! Who’s with me?