Writing can be a very daunting task. Unless you're damned good at it, you're going to get more rejection than acceptances, and those are going to be weighted towards the beginning. Which can be discouraging. Do I persevere? Will I ever get any accepted to anything?
And once the story is bought and released, there is still the worry that said story sucks. Did I spend enough time making sure that this point was made? Did I spend too much time hammering away at that one? The most frightening thing about writing is that there are precious few guidelines. And when reviews come in, they can be enormously mixed, depending on what the reader was expecting, which is sometimes not the story they read.
That said, yesterday Brian Keene posted his Top 10 Books of 2010. And I'm on it.
The review of some random person carries some weight. When an Amazon reviewer is moved to write: "I was confused as to why this had been written, as it seemed to have no overall point or connection to the cthulhu concept." Then perhaps I didn't pay as much attention to the words as I should have.
Positive words by a professional writer such as Ellen Datlow or Brian Keene, outweighs this by far. And I have to keep remembering that out of two stories eligible to get name-dropped in Year's Best Horror, both have been singled out for praise. I may not be taking the publishing world by storm, but I'm not even close to the bottom of the barrel, either.
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