Reasons I Feel Like a Fraud

1. I've never written a successful character-driven realist short story.
2. I've never written a successful sentence-driven hybrid literary text object.
3. One of my best-received stories, a prize winner, is a joke. (I don't mean this as an expression, like, "What a fucking joke," I mean literally, like "That's a funny joke, haha).
4. Blake Butler said humor is for cowards.*
5. My most passionate manuscripts are sitting on my desk as drafts. Some haven't been touched for nearly a year.
6. A month ago, I wrote and workshopped a new story that has so far met with the same fate.
7. I don't know how to use threaded imagery.
8. I am too influenced by/interested in pop culture.
9. I am too influenced by/interested in teenagers.
10. I am too influenced by/interested in sex I'm afraid of having.
11. Some of my published flash fictions are probably (ideas for) long stories with no follow-through.
12. Someone I trust thinks sections from my chapbook should be expanded into a novel, and I might agree, but I don't know how to write it.
13. Presses have offered to consider longer works and I haven't had anything to send them (opportunity w/o preparation).
14. I've never been published in an establishment journal. (As in one w/ some level of name recognition outside "indie lit" community, ie, University publication with some history).
15. I'm undisciplined.
16. I don't have a daily writing habit.
17. I spend more time on Google Reader than writing.
17. I'm better known for my blog comments than my writing.
18. I'm better known for my costumes than my texts.
19. I don't know how to write or talk about aesthetics. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm not smart enough to post at Big Other.
20. I've never read Deleuze, Barthes, Bloom, etc.
21. I've never read Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Borges or Beckett.
22. During the htmlgiant gender conversation, I had to wikipedia Artaud.
23. I keep saying I'm going to make a website but haven't done it.
24. I keep saying I'm going to make posters for readings but haven't done it.
25. I keep saying I'm going to make "lit crafts" to sell at readings, but haven't done it.
26. Jason Behrends solicited me for the Orange Alert podcast two months ago and I still haven't sent him my recording.
27. I was supposed to review Joe Young's Easter Rabbit and never did.
28. Scott McLanahan sent me a review copy of "Stories II" and I still haven't read it, even though I love Scott McLanahan.

*This is a paraphrase, and Blake said this during a discussion of live readings, in response the argument that humor is safer at readings, he wasn't trashing humor.

This list is meant to articulate an emotional space, not my actual values or beliefs. Many of these items are derived from fucked up external validation systems. The goal of this particular post was not to deconstruct these systems, but please feel free to do so in the comment thread.

The best response to this post is probably: OK. Now get over it and get to work.