Cassie is a rescue dog. That means she came to me with a whole lot of baggage. Some of it I know (a stray taken to the pound, adopted, then returned) and some of it I can only imagine. We’ve worked to overcome what we can. The separation anxiety is mostly gone now. The nervous barking has calmed down a lot. She doesn’t mind if you touch her anywhere, pick up any of her feet and tickle between the pads, lift her tail or brush her all over. I can put drops in her ears and stick my fingers in her mouth. Use a Dremel on her nails? No problem.

But she is still fearful of getting hurt. And I think it is emotional more than physical. I see it in the way she is afraid of small dogs, running to hide behind me as they approach. If I come at her with a hand over her head, she cowers. If I reach for her collar from the side, she drops her shoulders, puts her ears back and waits for the worst thing to happen. And if she goes out back and the angry teenage boy in the house behind us is yelling at his mom, she turns and runs back into the house. She’d rather cross her legs and hold it than walk out into all that angry noise. Some of these issues I still hope to overcome. Some of them, that fear that something bad is going to happen that cancels out all the good, I may never be able to completely take away.

I write from a place of constant fear.

There are the basic fears that many writers have. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of no one liking what I write, even after it’s published. Fear of success and fear of failure. Fear of being judged a certain kind of person because of what I do or don’t write about.

But the biggest fear is probably that someone will learn something about me, sometime maybe I didn’t want them to know, maybe even something I don’t know myself, all because they read my stories so closely they found the pieces of me woven between the words.

It’s what I fear and yet, it’s also why I write.

Those pieces of me that make it into the story, my heart, my blood, my tears, are what connect me to the reader. Even if it is just one person, just to know I touched someone with my words, well it’s powerful enough to keep me coming back to the keyboard no matter how afraid I might be.

My last book, Hugging the Rock, was a heart-wrung kind of story. Because of the subject matter the reader came to the book expecting to have me stomp on their heart a few times. One of my favorite reviews came from Cynthia Leithch Smith (Cynsations) who said in part, “It’s also a whole-heart book. You feel your whole heart break and re-knit as you read.‘ I admit that I like it when people tell me it made them cry. The writing of it all made me cry too.

Flyboy’s story is different. It’s not a funny story yet it’s not one that you would come to expecting to have your heart broken and put back together again. But that’s what I’m trying to do. And to do that I need to run headfirst into the angry noises and let them rain down on me.

It’s not easy. I don’t trust myself. But I do trust the story.

And I’m trying not to cower or pull away.