Back in October, I signed up at Procrastinating Writers to get daily tips for keeping up with my NaNoWriMo word count. And lo and behold, after I posted about my fears last night, today’s tip was about precisely that. It included a link to a series of articles, The Things Procrastinators Fear, available on their site.

Of their four identified fears, I struggle in this instance with fear of failure and fear of not being good enough. Why write a scene that I find difficult? There are other sorts of scenes that I can write easily, that I know I can get right the first time out. And why risk writing a scene if I could fail at it? It might be bad. It might make the story worse. It might make readers point and laugh.

Yeah, no. That kind of self-defeating crap is not going to fly here. So, new task! Every day, I’m going to write five hundred words of sex scene, starting with a new one each day. If writing sex scenes freaks me out so much that I can’t get anything else done, well, I’m just going to have to get over it. No backing down this time. I don’t expect that I will share any of the writing at any point, but I will try to drop updates about it now and then.

I’m going to open with an exercise from Bret Anthony Johnston’s Naming the World, the new and delicious book of writing exercises I bought a while back. I made a sort of unofficial pledge to myself that I would do one of the warm-up exercises in the back of the book each day, until I run out of them, at which point I’ll just have to find new ones somewhere else. I guess I’m making that official now, too. The exercise, which I should have written yesterday, but continued to chicken out on, is to spend five minutes listing what turns you on.

I can handle this. It’s just a list. No need to fear a list. I’ll use the list, though, as a jumping-off point for the first few scenes that I will write. After all, I might as well enjoy them, right? ;) So wish me luck, please, as I face up to my fears and get my writing back on track.