I’ll be honest.  I’m complicated.  I worry about a lot of things.  I over-analyze.  I dissect.  (Nod your head sympathetically toward my husband.  He’ll appreciate the gesture.)

Sometimes I feel like I’ve got a whole universe jammed inside my skin.  I’m stretched tight like a sausage with all the stuff I think about.  (Bonus points if you know why I selected that image.)

I’m not going to tell you what I worry about.  Mostly it’s boring, cliche, or embarrassing.  But I will tell you that the worrying is analogous to my writing process.  In the same way I might  fret about my kids’ future, I turn the elements of my story around and around.  I twist and tangle and ultimately untangle the narrative threads.  Because I’m complicated, I write complex characters in shifting universes.  I like to think that the personal anxiety has a purpose that is made manifest in the writing.

But the curious thing (and the point of this post) is that I never feel anxious about writing the book.  Isn’t that weird?  I worry about all these things, but there’s a deep down secure knowledge that I can write the book.  I will serve the story.  And I’m always learning how to do it better.  Cool, huh?