Deliberately building self-confidence

I've written before about the split personality of a writer. We have to be simultaneously the most confident and the most humble people we know. It's a tough balance to strike, at some places on the road to publication more than others.

I realized I haven't felt self-confident about a single thing I've written since I've started querying THE TRAVELERS. Even my favorite favorite most beloved ever scene from ONE (the WiP)) - I look at it and think, "Eh, this is cliched." or "Urgh, what was I thinking with that WORD CHOICE GOD I AM THE STUPIDEST WRITER EVER."

You know. That kind of thing.

See, it's easy to get down. We can read posts by published authors telling us that no matter how ready we think we are to submit and publish - WE'RE NOT (awesome, thanks. SUPER helpful - ) and we can read twitter feeds of agents making fun of queriers all the live long day.

Um...does that include publishing? We're screwed, aren't we?

 Even if we delete our rejections like we're supposed to (I do! I swear! All, like, ten bajillion of them.) it's hard not to keep at least a rough tally living in your head. Soon, we can spot a rejection email in less than two seconds. Literally. (The tip-off: It has the word "subjective" in it.)

You'd think by now I might've turned around...YOU'D BE WRONG.

The thing is - the aspiring agented/published may come to believe these things so deeply - that we're never good enough to query, that first novels don't publish, that regular people can't be writers - that trying to build self confidence- yes, on purpose - might seem silly, indulgent, pointless.

That's what I thought, too.

But then, in a random email kvetch to my writing buddy Peggy, she told me to do something completely ridiculous - go back and read THE TRAVELERS. Fall in love with it again.

Now, Peggy one of the most humble writers I know. If she's telling me to purposefully hype myself up on my own writing, I sit up and listen.

I recently decided to do a last-ditch query flurry for THE TRAVELERS. My incredible, generous, genius CPs spent days reworking my query with me, and eventually everyone gave it a thumbs up. There was just one problem - I couldn't put together the emails. Couldn't click send. I realized after a few days that it was a problem of me losing faith in TT, even before I had officially given up on it.  It was then that I decided I owed it to TT to gather every strategy that I know of for building self confidence into one great big basket and throw every one straight at the query process.

Here are some things that help me build self-confidence and/or rekindle my love for my work:

• Listen to the soundtrack
• Read your book again. Especially the steamy scenes.
• Talk to the CPs that you know will give you hugs, love, and support.
• Before you whine to them any more, find a drill-sergeant CP who will force you to query through threats and shame.
• 
• Remember what you're awesome at (Peggy's post about that here and mine here)
• Send out one of Those Scenes just for the fun of it. You know which kinds I'm talking about. Your CPs will squeal because of what happens in the Scene, but you'll feel like they're in love with your writing.
• Seek out inspiration. My favorites here,  here and here. (You might cry.)

Your turn! Do you deliberately build self-confidence to gear up for some part of the writing process? How?