Confirmation in Unlikely Places

After attending the Mid-Atlantic Fiction Writers conference in August, 2015, I was on my way to take possession of a rescued crested gecko when I got the idea to write a cozy mystery that would delve into some of Blackbeard's history.

I'm about 2/3 of the way into the book and the worst thing happened. I lost focus. For a few weeks my book stayed closed. The pages began gathering dust. Terrible thoughts entered my head, like: Should I scrap what I have and rewrite everything in limited first-person point of view?

In case you're wondering, I posed that to my fellow Mountain Scribes (my writing group) at our First Annual Christmas Party and the answer was a resounding, "No!"

Then two wonderful things happened. The first was that I confessed my fears to my friend David. He quoted lines from a NaNoWriMo Pep Talk by Neil Gaiman. Knowing that Neil Gaiman suffers from these same qualms actually made me feel a lot better.

The second thing happened when I was randomly looking at bits of analytical information from the Becky Muth Author Page on Facebook. When trying to decipher who in the world (literally, places like Nigeria and Las Vegas and Australia, even!) liked my page, I saw this:

There you have it. One of my fans speaks pirate. If knowing that Neil Gaiman suffers from "I'm not good enough"-itis wasn't enough, then having a fan who speaks pirate is more than plenty. Whoever you are, you pirate-speaking-fan of mine, than you. I so needed this.

Are you a writer who found confirmation in unlikely places? Do you feel like your train of thought derailed around Chapter 8 and you're not sure how to get back on track? Let me hear about it in the comments section. I'd love to talk about this with you!