Self-Doubt is an Evil Demon, Banish It, Now, Writer Babies!

Failing one time? It doesn’t make you a failure.
Failing 1,000 times? Still doesn’t make you a failure. You’re only a failure if you decide to be.

That evil inner voice? The butt-face that says you aren’t good enough, that you don’t deserve good things, that you can’t do it?

That little monster is Self-doubt. It hangs out a lot with its big sister, Anxiety. And you don’t have to have them over to play in your head anymore.

Just this week, we posted our podcast and a guy (editor/writer) on Twitter didn’t like it but posted a link to his own blog and said, “COUNTER POINT.”

His blog was all about not wanting to give out writing advice or talking about his own life/anxiety/whatever issues.

All of that is so fine and good for him for telling the world why he is the way his beautiful self is, but this little bit of me was like:

What? Counterpoint? Counterpoint to saying life is deeper than write what you know?

Counterpoint to what?

And why the hell did you post under my tweet your own link without even having the grace to like mine?

If my blog post (if you even read it) inspired you enough to ‘counterpoint’ why not like it?

And then I had a lot of work to do helping writers and writing my own stories and I let it go.

It was a bit of a win for me, honestly. Because all I want to do is be a better human and one step towards that? For me? It’s banishing Self-doubt.

It’s almost like the universe gave me a present right there.

But this isn’t just about me. It’s also about you and how you can do that too, right?

Here’s how to kick Self-Doubt and Anxiety out of your house.

  1. Tell them to get out. Seriously, once they start whispering their disparaging believes about your worth, tell them, “Get out. I hear you. I don’t need you. Bugger off. You’re ruining the party.”
  2. Remember good things. If Self-doubt is a bully who won’t leave, you sometimes have to call in the reinforcements. Those reinforcements are the good time, the good memories. The times you were proactive and kicked butt.
  3. Phone a friend or text or Facetime. Sometimes your own memories aren’t strong enough and you have to talk to someone about your self-doubt. Telling another person about your doubts sometimes helps you realize how dorky they are and how they are like the OOPS page on a Rotten Tomatoes movie listing. The congnative dissonance because obvious when you say things aloud.
  4. Make a Journal of Awesome. At one point in my life, I had to print out people’s positive emails and reviews so that I could remember that I had helped people, that my stories connected to people before. I even put in fan mail and fan art and blog posts about positive interactions. Yes, I really was that depressed. Self-doubt had set up home.
  5. Failing one time? It doesn’t make you a failure.
  6. Failing 1,000 times? Still doesn’t make you a failure. You’re only a failure if you decide to be.
  7. Remember you aren’t the center of the universe. I know! I know! You ARE the center of your own universe probably, but we all have to push away our inner narcissist and remember that most people aren’t noticing what you’re doing. Yes, there are trolls out there, but they most likely won’t find you. And if they do? They’re trolls and you’re awesome and you will deal with it. Don’t let your fear of ridicule keep you from living your dreams.

That one is a big one for me, really, which was why ‘counterpoint’ was a bit of a setback.

I’m still working on it and it’s the main reason I still blog, do podcasts, and YouTube. All those things force me out of my comfort zone and into past trauma places about my voice and weirdness. The more I do it? The stronger I get about it.

Oh! And the last one is so important that it’s getting pulled from the list.

What other people think about you doesn’t get to determine who you are.

That’s right. I have a sibling who thinks I’m lying about my DNA. His belief that I’m a liar? It doesn’t make me a liar. I have DNA tests to back me up. Yes, I’ve got the receipts.

But even if you don’t have the receipts, don’t let anyone else make you the villain or the victim of your own story. Only YOU get to decide that. No matter what other people do to you, think of you, say about you, only YOU get to determine if you love yourself and if you have worth.

Here’s the final secret: You do.

LET’S HANG OUT!

HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?

MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?

Email us at carriejonesbooks@gmail.com


HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.

We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. 


Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!

One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?

And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.


And Carrie has new books out! Yay!

You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!

best thrillers The People Who Kill
The people who kill

It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.

And that one is called  THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series.  I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!

The Dude Goodfeather Series - YA mystery by NYT bestseller Carrie Jones
The Dude Goodfeather Series – YA mystery by NYT bestseller Carrie Jones

TO TELL US YOUR BRAVE STORY JUST EMAIL BELOW.

“When the ceiling caves in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. You have to learn to live along fault lines.”

— Suleika Jaouad (@suleikajaouad) author of memoir Between Two Kingdoms.

Rejection Doesn’t Have to Be the End

The first story I ever wrote was not the first one I published. It was the story I made up for Em, my kiddo, when we were in the car while I drove to assignments when I worked for our local paper.

Em
Em

I loved this story so much because it was for Em and a piece of it got me into graduate school (It was part of my application) and because it made me realize (again) how much I’d loved writing stories.

I’d spent a lot of time being in crappy situations. My car became my bed for awhile. College-onset epilepsy thanks to a weird Epstein-Barr virus attacking my brain derailed my plans to go to Ireland, to go to law school, and lowered my cognitive abilities. Some people were tremendously mean to me, people that were supposed to love me.

And I forgot who I was and what I loved (other than Em) until I started writing that story.

That sounds like a perfect trope, doesn’t it? Woman finds self by being a writer, becomes international bestseller, blah-blah-blah. Suddenly she is bathed in romantic lighting, hair flitting around her, singing show tunes or something, birds alighting on her wrist?

It wasn’t like that. My writing journey was hard and full of self-doubt and rejection.

I tell a lot of the writers that I mentor not to give up on their old stories, but to put them away for a bit. Writing isn’t a straight line to success and life isn’t always like that either. This post from pre-published Carrie back in 2005 totally shows that.

Hold on.

Today, is my whining day.


Two days left before Christmas and nothing is done. I haven’t bought presents for my parents yet! This is very, very bad.

But that isn’t the problem. The problem is that today I had the epiphany that I am THE STINKIEST WRITER IN THE WORLD and that I am NEVER EVER GOING TO GET PUBLISHED and that I’m spending $6,000 a semester to be a better writer, which means…. what? I won’t be as horrible as I was before, but still not any good. I am like the super ugly girl who keeps entering beauty contests. I keep losing, but I keep deluding myself that trying is a good thing. I really am pretty/an okay writer/not hideous really, really, really.

All of this is because today I received a rejection notice from Scholastic. They took my story off the slush pile and kept it for a couple weeks and then rejected me… on DECEMBER 23… MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

What did I do? Oh, I am mature. I sat in the Subaru in the parking lot at the post office, put my head on the steering wheel and sobbed while my my friend pet my back, and my sweet little girl watched from the backseat, telling me that my story was “Super, super good and that editor just didn’t have good taste.”

I kept crying.

Now, I know I’ve given her something to talk about in therapy when she’s in her 20s…. “My mom was so weak. My mom didn’t believe in herself.”

Thinking about that just made me more depressed, of course.

Truth Time

That story didn’t get published in 2005. It didn’t get published in 2007. It didn’t get published in 2009. I published it in 2016 after I’d published a lot of other books.

This is that book.

Time Stoppers Middle Grade Fantasy Series by Carrie Jones
Time Stoppers Front – US versions

Time Stoppers is still my favorite because it is about friendship and magic and has crow monsters and dragons, but it’s also my favorite because it made me a writer. It made me persistent. Time Stoppers made me cry in cars. It made me push through rejection. This book made me be able to tell other writers, “Don’t give up. You’ve got this. Write.” I knew that it could happen because it happened for me.

So here, writers:

Don’t give up.

You have stories.

Your stories deserve to be heard.

Keep writing.

You don’t need to be a writer to hear this.

Don’t give up.

You have stories.

Your stories deserve to be heard.

Keep writing.




WRITING AND OTHER NEWS

IN THE WOODS – READ AN EXCERPT, PREORDER NOW!

My next book, IN THE WOODS, appears in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books for Summer 2019. There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!

You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?

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YouTube and Us

We’ve started (slowly) to post videos on YouTube. I hope you’ll check them out. They aren’t (cough) high-tech, but they are high-goofy.

HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON

On February first, I’m going to launch my Patreon site where I’ll be reading chapters (in order) of a never-published teen fantasy novel, releasing deleted scenes and art from some of my more popular books. And so much more.

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WHAT IS PATREON? 

A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you. 

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HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!


BE A PART OF THE PODCAST!

Hey! If you download the Anchor application, you can call into the podcast, record a question, or just say ‘hi,’ and we’ll answer. You can be heard on our podcast! Sa-sweet!

No question is too wild. But just like Shaun does, try not to swear, okay?

Here is the link to the mobile app.

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