Sheryl Paul, the author of Wisdom of Anxiety, defines anxiety as a feeling of dread, agitation, or foreboding associated with a danger that does not exist in the present moment.
Applied to my present situation, something terrible might happen if I fail in my challenge, but there is no real evidence that it actually will, making it really bizarre.
There is a stoic technique for coping with this kind of worry called — “the premeditation of evils” — the practice of envisioning what the real worst-case scenario in any given situation could truly be.
I tried to imagine that.
What would happen if I am not able to finish the book in one week.
Well, one is, I will lose my face with my followers.
Second, and I will add another feather of failure to my cap.
I am more worried about the second than the first. Most people are very kind. My fans would be very sympathetic even if I failed. It will be I who will be beating myself over the failure.
I need to learn to be kind to myself. I need to look at what I was able to achieve rather than what I could not complete.
I got over the panic.
Not because of the above rationale but because I got sick of it.
I said to myself, ‘whatever,’ and kept going.
I couldn’t start working till mid-morning.
But once I sat down, I was in a flow state. Maybe it had something to do with sitting in the bed where I do most of my writing, or there is simply no time to waste. I edited two chapters in one go.
I got up, had a shower, cooked and served lunch, and got back to my station. I only had two more hours to work on the project before another commitment. But rather than editing the next chapter, I got carried away finding relevant quotes to include in the book. This is something I had been putting away because of the time I was going to take.
But I managed to edit two more chapters. They were relatively quick to edit.
After dinner, I created a Kindle Direct Publishing account.
By the end of the day. I had five chapters edited. The final word count 16,454.
Tomorrow, four chapters to edit. Also need to get all the metadata ready.
I think I will get there.
Read the previous posts to catch up on the story of writing an eBook in a week.
I Am Writing An eBook In A Week
Day 1 — Writing An EBook In One Week
Day 2 — Writing An eBook In One Week
Day 3 — Writing An eBook In One Week
Day 4 — Writing An eBook In One Week
Day 5 — Writing An eBook In One Week
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