Trust30 – #6 – Faith

Our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I’ve said on recent Galley Table podcasts (available at flyingislandpress.com/flagship), I made a committment to bring a completed manuscript to Balticon next year. And failure would mean… DIRE CONSEQUENCES. This is a scary thing. On many levels.

There’s a reason that you haven’t seen any of the books I’ve written for NaNoWriMo. That reason is, I’m pretty convinced that they suck. BUT… Pressfield makes a good point when he says:

“Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneurs worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. Its only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.” - Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

So, I’m giving myself permission to turn that rational thought off. You will see to the side of the blog here that there’s a new feature – a word count feature. Realistically, the thing I’m editing is maybe going to suck.

But for the rest of the year, at least as far as my writing is concerned, I’m giving myself permission to believe. To have faith. And as I’m fond of quoting, “Faith is the motivating cause of all action”.

And what says action like ghost bears?