Atop my desk, where I see it everyday, there’s a picture of a woman pirouetting above a frozen lake.
Underneath it, it says “If you must walk on thin ice, you might as well learn to dance.”
I’ve been doing a lot of looking back into my writing career — and the recent past anyway. This is a side effect of my spending a lot of time cleaning around here and finally not just putting things away that should have been done five years ago, but also getting rid of a lot of things that have accrued over the last five years because the house wasn’t organized, so we keep buying duplicates. And triplicates.
This means looking at a lot of the stuff that I’ve accumulated and sometimes at weird and surprising glimpses into my past and my career.
Other things have played into it, of course. Including my mom’s death, which inevitably has stirred up memories and thoughts of paths not taken.
Overall, as far as I can determine, the only thing that has held me back in all of my writing career is fear.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: there were people who did things. Mistakes were made, both mine and others.
BUT overall, the worst of it has been the fear: fear of writing what I really wanted to write; fear of writing what I was writing in the way it needed to be written. And also, fear of demanding what I knew the book needed. Fear of speaking frankly to… well, everyone.
Fear.
It not only hurt my career, but it made me… less.
To an extent it was responsible for how ill I got. But beyond that, because when you write, you are writing with all you are, it made me less capable of writing what I should have written, how it should be written.
It made me less, far less, than I could be.
Was it stupid fear? No. I was terrified that any book could be my last. You see, it wasn’t under my control at all. In some ways it wasn’t under anyone’s control.
It has been said that even trad pub doesn’t know how to sell books. If they did, they wouldn’t do so many of the strange things they do. But a lot of the influence in a book selling has to do with… well, cover. If people even have heard of it (It has amazed me that No man’s Land sells copies every time I mention it somewhere major, despite (I think) all the saturation publicity I’ve done. (Though not classic publicity because I haven’t figured that out yet.)
NONE of that had anything to do with me. The only thing I could do was write the best book possible, but that only mattered once the book was in someone’s hands. So– until then– I was powerless.
So being afraid was rational.
My career would end up at any minute, through no fault of my own. And because of this, being a rational woman, I was afraid. I had a lot of investment, more every year, which — yet — couldn’t guarantee any kind of success.
And yet, as bad as the situation was; as much as I was right to be scared, the fear itself hurt me and my career.
Now? Now there are options. Now you can be in charge of your career. Sure, I’m still discovering this world and all the new possibilities. And likely you are too.
So, on this New Year’s Eve, as we venture forth into an unexplored and unwritten future, as much as none of us knows what comes next, and it’s all very scary, BE NOT AFRAID.
I wish you a fearless 2026
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “If You Must Walk On Thin Ice”
A great new year’s eve post, and thank you!
But if you’re going to dance, don’t do the Prisiadki or the flamenco
V/R
William Lehman
And definitely not clog dancing!
Let’s do the Time Warp agaiiiiiiin! 😎
I wholeheartedly agree Sarah!
I’ve always been that guy. The guy who asks a Hollywood director in a lecture, “Is it important to know yiddish words like chutzpah, while demonstrating my ignorance by mispronouncing the word using the same ch sound as in China instead of khootz pah.
The guy who asks a panel of hall of fame writers at a WorldCon panel, “How to you get somebody to read your stuff when you’re starting out?” And then, when Harlan Ellison replies, “You have to write and have something to show,” handing him the manuscript of my latest short story. (He read a few pages, gave me a couple of tips, and announced to the crowd, “Well, he knows how to write a sentence.”)
The guy who goes up to Ray Bradbury after one of his lectures and says, “I want to be a great writer like you.” He smiled and said, “That’s great kid. Do it.” Four years later, I introduced myself to him at the World Fantasy Con with, “You won’t remember me, but I was this snot-nosed kid who cornered you after a lecture years ago and told you I want to be a great writer like you. I just sold my first story.” He graciously replied, “I actually remember that. Send me the second copy. The first one goes to your mother, but send me the second copy.”
I’m the guy like Al Ruddy who walks onto the Paramount Studio and introduces himself to the head of the studio with, “I’m Al Ruddy, and I want to make movies.” He got hired and ended up producing The Godfather among others.
You’ve got to be the guy like J. Michael Straczynski who gets told the equivalent of “You’ll never work in this town again,” five different times and just keeps moving on.
There are many terrible ways to die, but the one you’ll regret the most is dying from fear of embarrassment. Kafka’s story, Vor dem Gesetz always stayed with me.
I’m not sure I ever noticed the thickness of the ice. I had stories to tell, learned that people liked them (not family people), and indie publishing had developed. So I saved money, hired cover art people, and an editor, and the rest is a large backlist and not too bad income. And sometimes happy readers, too!
I first encountered this saying here. How many others did?
Happy New Year everybody! ~:D
Happy new year, Phantom! Good writing.
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Happy New Year! We ain’t skeer’d.