Something happened when it came time to send The Things We Crave into the world. I froze. I couldn’t pull the trigger. “The book needs a rewrite,” I told my friends, smiling like a goon. “It needs revision…”

The revision lasted several months. During this period I reworked scenes, then entire chapters. I paced about my apartment and acted out dialogue, as confident as a long haired cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I didn’t know it at the time, but a Dream Eater had me by the throat; and I was the Dream Eater.

Your best friend and worst enemy is the guy or gal in the mirror. This is true for writers, especially when it’s time to share their work with the world. It’s one thing to write a story and show it to you friend and quite another to put a book into the hands of strangers. But writing is about sharing your work. It’s what Ariel Gore means when she says, “Nourish the world with your words. Yo.” What good is a manuscript on a hard drive? On that note, what good is that writer?

Publishing your work is proclaiming to the world, “This is the best I can do. It’s the best book I can write and it’s worthy of your time and money because I say so.” That’s frightening because it goes without saying that somebody is going to disagree. Hell, maybe a lot of somebodys will disagree. And if too many somebodys disagree it’s going to hurt. It’s that fear that the internal Dream Eater feeds upon. The paralysis will keep your words hidden away while someone else’s earn an Amazon ranking.

The fact is The Things We Crave is the best book I can write at this time. Will it be the best book I can write next year? No way, next year I’ll be better. Did it benefit from months of revision? Not really. Will some people like it? Yup. Will some hate it? Definitely. Does it matter? You know the answer. 

What I know for sure is that one particular Dream Eater is dead. I’ve got my sock clad feet propped on his sorry, dead ass right now. ”Rest in peace, mother fucker.” Good riddance to him. And now that he’s down the world’s gonna hear a lot more from me.