Sherri--

No need to apologize. I always find that it's healthy to let my monsters out. They're like vampires; they lose their potency as soon as the sunlight touches their bodies.

I just went to your website again and looked at your picture. You're a radiant being, completely worthy of those dreams of grandeur.

As far as believing in yourself as a writer, you ARE a writer. You don't have to take it on faith. Of course, of all people, I understand that it's not that simple. Some days I, too, have a hard time believing in my gifts. My guess is that most writers do. There's a mysteriousness to the process of creating any kind of art that engenders insecurity--a sense that our creations simultaneously come from us and from something beyond us and out of our control.

Here's a true story:

A writing friend told me when I first started working on Defying Gravity that I would have days where I would be so despairing and feel like such a fraud that I would want to give back my advance and call it quits. (She was right.) She said a friend of hers had written an entire book minus the last two chapters when the doubt monster started gnawing at her feet. This woman actually DID call her agent. She told him that she wanted to pull out of her contract and that the book wasn't very good anyway. The agent listened to her rant and then told her to get back to work. The book won a Pulitzer Prize.