Can I get real for a minute?

I’m getting ready to write the outline for my next, and last horror book of the year.

I’m going to write about a native Kenyan schizophrenic coming over to America and losing his mind. I’m a pasty white boy from Virginia who’s never crossed the Rockies, much less been overseas. I’m no schizophrenic. I’m not sane either (heh). The only thing I have going for me is that I have done a lot of research into schizophrenia – in fact, this book is based on a study I happened to have stumbled across while looking for something else entirely.

I don’t have the background for this.

I don’t even think this is my book.

I’ll just quietly retreat from all of this and go back to comedy…

Now, I have written about murder, without having committed a murder. I’ve written about elves without having pointed ears and a six-hundred-year outlook on life. I’ve written about cannibalism without having so much as biting someone in anger. Why do I feel so nervous about this particular book?

Is it the climate that this book is being written in? The fact that I have put in the kind of work that I have, and my whole career can be killed even before it gets off the ground by someone calling a racist? Even if I take the time to defend my position, would anyone bother to hear it? The pessimist in me (a loud, old man to be sure) says that no one is going to care. The label will be slapped on me and that will be that.

If only that many people *read* the book…

Should I write this book, though? I could easily hand it off to someone else. Someone who has more experience than me in certain matters. I can finish the outline, drop off photocopies of everything and say “Good luck! Remember me in the author’s dedication list!”. Being a ghost writer is an honorable profession. So is using a pseudonym. We can ask Anne Rampling how that worked out for her.

I would hand it off to someone, even offer to write it for them and give them credit…but my ego would never allow it. I could not stay quiet if I gave this away and it became a success. The bitterness would overtake me so fast, it’d make your head spin. The rest of my life would be chasing that success to reclaim it.

What should I do, then? Write it and then quietly smother the baby in the crib? Set all my research aside and hope to find someone willing to be the front face of this particular book? The pressure behind the sunk-cost fallacy is real.