Facing Fear of Failure

By Jeffe Kennedy

This is the cover for my next TWELVE KINGDOMS book, THE TALON OF THE HAWK. It comes out May, 2015, but the Addicted 2 Heroines blog is running a Hottest Heroines cover contest for all covers revealed in 2014. I was thrilled they chose the TALON cover for round one, and even more delighted that it won that round! Even more, I’m really pleased that Kensington gave my warrior princess such a strong pose.

She’s fearless and it shows.

Not so easy for the rest of us, but then our battles tend to be less overt. I was talking with a writer friend the other day about fear and how starting each new book is an act of courage. She’d tweeted something that struck a chord with me and we went back and forth about it. It was a well-timed conversation for me because I’m drafting a new erotic romance, the third in my FALLING UNDER trilogy. And this week I saw two Publishers Weekly reviews for my books. One, for UNDER HIS TOUCH, the second in the FALLING UNDER trilogy, which comes out in January, is pretty good. But it penetrated my brain, little whispers of it echoing as I draft this new book. Worse, the other review, for THE TEARS OF THE ROSE, the second book in THE TWELVE KINGDOMS, which came out two weeks ago is really quite terrible. One of those deals where the reviewer did not get at all what the story meant to do. If the very same book hadn’t been nominated for best Fantasy Romance of the year in the RT Reviewers Choice awards, I’d have been devastated.

As it is, I can recognize that this sort of thing is inevitable when I make bold choices as a writer. In THE TEARS OF THE ROSE I took on writing an unlikable heroine. One that most readers say they feel like slapping for the first half of the book – until they discover they’ve slowly grown to like and admire her, until at the end they’re cheering. That’s exactly what I wanted. I don’t think our heroines should be perfect people. We celebrate the deeply flawed hero who redeems himself – I wanted the same thing for this heroine. I knew going in that some readers would not get this at all. We can talk about the social reasons that women are held to different standards of likability than men, but it’s an old conversation. This book was my offering to that dialogue.

It took courage to write it anyway. It’s hard to hear harsh criticism, even when you knew it was possible, even likely.

I think it’s even more difficult to battle this fear in this age of dense social media. Everywhere I turn I see harsh reviews, pet peeves and rants about books. In fact, I wrote a whole blog post on how damaging I think it is for writers to read any of those lists or articles on “tropes that need to die.” The upshot is that fear of criticism kills creativity.

As I said, all of this has been heavy on my mind as I draft this new erotic romance. I’m a write-for-discovery writer. While I know my general premise, I follow the story as I write. This book is taking me to dark, angsty places. I resisted the story for a while, thinking about potential criticism. Which led to me spinning for a number of days. When readers and reviewers question why the author made a particular choice, I think they don’t realize how often it’s not our choice at all. It’s the story’s choice. At least, that’s true for me – I can either follow the story or I can fight it. Guess who eventually wins?

Still, it takes courage at every stage – writing, sending out to my agent and editor, revising, release day, facing reader feedback and reviews.

If only I had a big golden sword, huh?