I have a fear of roaches. I hate the buggers. Six legs, body composed of all wings and a very small head... Speaking of a head, I will never forget the day I beheaded a roach only to have my small victory be quashed as the HEADLESS ROACH BEGAN TO MOVE TOWARDS ME!!! I almost screamed in horror and, using the broom as a club, killed the bugger as fast as I could. I hate roaches.
What causes such intense phobias, do you think? I didn't really have a traumatic experience to cause me to be an arachnophobe, it just happened.
Well, I did see a roach crawling up my leg when I was a small child, so that may have been what done it.
Physical fear: Heights. The MIT hacking culture has helped me subvert this; I now know that, if I really have to, I can make my fear sit down and shut up. But that doesn't make the fear go away. Also, hand and eye trauma. Not something I dwell on, but the idea of going blind or having my hands ruined terrifies me. Broad fear: I worry that I am a terribly selfish person at heart, and that this will ruin my relationship with my family. (Special circumstances. It's complicated.) Writerly fear: I don't like the idea that I will never actually get around to submitting stories. This comes about because while I am told that I am a good writer, I haven't written anything "good enough" in my mind for me to send to F&SF or Asimov's or Analog. (Close, though. That one's going to get edited & sent at some point.) The statistics are that for every thousand people who "want to have been published," only about one actually gets to the point where they submit their work to a market. And while I understand why this might be -- heck, I've been writing for some ten years and I've only finished about four really good short stories -- it just creeps me out to think that I might continue down this road forever, without ever getting published or having the guts to try. (This isn't so bad now as it used to be, since last spring I won a couple of writing prizes, one for a novella and one for a short story. But the fear lingers.)
My greatest fear with writing is that I won't be accepted. I hear all the time about writers who have to try multiple times before they're finally published, so even though I want to write, have all of those great ideas I want to give out, I sometimes have a voice in my head that says, "What's the point?" I worry about what if I got my first rejection letter. How will I react to it? I know it's not something I should worry about now, I should just write; but I still have it in my head.
