237.

That’s the number of public libraries in Indiana. I wrote a letter to each of them, asking them to consider ordering my new anthology, MY NAME WAS NEVER FRANKENSTEIN.

Putting together these letters shouldn’t have been that hard. I mean, we can debate the wisdom or cost-effectiveness of this promotional strategy, but the work itself is just . . . work.

So it shouldn’t have taken me months to do it. And yet it did.

When it comes to writing stories and novels, I have as much imposter syndrome as the next schmo, but it’s never stopped me from writing.

When it comes to “being a writer” out in the world, though—especially the business of promotion—it’s a different deal. My self-consciousness ramps up to paranoia. I hear all the terrible voices.

That’s his idea of promotion?

Oh, that’ll never work.

Who does he think he is?

Nobody wants to read his stuff, anyway.

So I hide. I shirk. I put off promotional tasks, telling myself I have more important things to do. Telling myself that promotion doesn’t really work, anyway.

And all the while I feel enormously guilty that I’m not doing more to help my book and my publisher.

Sometimes my students are filled with doubt about their writing and they ask me how they can get over this feeling. You can’t, I tell them. And if you wait for your doubt to go away, you’ll never write. Find a way to co-exist. Tell it to make itself comfortable in one corner of the room, and then go off to the other corner and write.

It’s the same deal with “being a writer.” Those doubts and fears are always going to be there. If I wait for them to ease up, I’ll never give my work a chance in the world. And now that I see that, I have to follow my own advice.

(237 thanks to my wife, Shelly, who helped me stuff these envelopes and kept me from burning them all in despair.)