Chasing The Dream

I can't believe we are halfway through the 12 X 12 in 2012 challenge.  I have five picture book manuscripts completed and almost finished with the sixth.  It's been all about chasing a dream of mine that began over 40 years ago.

Poetry has lived in my head since I was eight years old and by the time I was in fourth grade I had a dream of becoming a writer.  I chased that dream for years; first filling notebooks with virgin efforts at poetry, then essays about whatever struck my interest and even a stint at being editor-in-chief of my high school paper.  No one knew of my passion for writing and I focused on that dream to the exclusion of many other things.

Yet dreams are sometimes hard to catch and when I was in my twenties I allowed other people's opinions to darken my visions of becoming a writer.  I tried to silence the voices in my head for twenty years and thought I would be content to just read the works of others.  But dreams are funny things.  They don't die easily, so when the timing was right my voices began invading my dreams again and I returned to my writer roots once more.



Maybe there was a reason for the silence.  Maybe I needed time to mature as a writer...time to discover this wonderful writing community I'm so proud to be a part of...time to be able to participate in Julie Hedlund's wonderful 12 X 12 in 2012 Halfway There Blog Party ( http://www.juliehedlund.com/2012/06/25/were-halfway-there/ ) and celebrate a milestone in my new writing career.  And maybe it's not about getting the picture perfect ending, but about the journey through the story itself.  About doing whatever it takes to chase that dream...

A Penny For Your Thoughts?

There once was a saying..."A penny for your thoughts"...as if to say that was all they were worth.  Then people started throwing pennies into fountains for good luck and making wishes on them.  I say people didn't put enough value on those thoughts back then, so I have come up with a new saying..."A dollar for your dreams"...

Writers are full of dreams so why not give them true value?  And if dreams are where all the story book magic begins, then why not ask for something one hundred times better that what we have gotten in the past?  Writers today have it tough.  We dream big and then go to the wishing well and throw our pennies in...hoping to get an agent...hoping to get a book offer...hoping to become successful at this career which can sometimes frustrate while still driving us to constantly improve ourselves.

Sometimes writers fear the well will dry up or freeze over and what will we do then?  I think we have nothing to worry about.  The world is full of dreamers and the ideas that spark the next great story lay all around us.  We just need to keep our eyes and ears open for the wonderful possibilities out there.  And we need to continue to dream big.  Not just penny-worth...let's make it one hundred times bigger and dream a dollar's worth...and yeah, lets get a bigger wishing well!

The Legacy of a Twenty-Pound Fur Ball

There is not much you can do when a twenty-pound fur ball decides it is time for you to get up.

I work long hours during the week at a very demanding job.  When my grown up son moved out of the house recently, I decided the rules regarding my weekend needed to change.  My life used to be driven by the demands of raising a child, but now I realized I was free to stay up as long as I wanted on Saturday, and could simply sleep in on Sunday.  Boy was I wrong.

Just this past weekend, I did what so many busy people do these days.  I spent most of Saturday running around like the Mad Hatter, dashing here and there, and trying to complete all the things on my “to do” list that I couldn’t cram into my already busy week.  By the time Saturday night came along, I was ready to just relax and catch up on some “me” time.  Six hours later, I’m deep into a romance novel and realize it’s now two a.m. Sunday morning; maybe I should be thinking about getting some rest.  No problem, my time is my own and I can just sleep in until noon because I’m a free agent.  Again, boy was I wrong.

All I can remember of my dream is that it involves a tall, dark, handsome man and a hot tub when a short, stumpy fur ball decides Mommy needs to wake up now.  If at first a gentle paw tap to the shoulder doesn’t work, then maybe claws to the head will do the trick.  I sleepily swat the offending paw out of the way and try to recapture the dream.  Next comes the fur ball pushing its way under my covers to crouch next to me, capturing one of my hands between it’s paws and proceeds to chew on a knuckle.  Startled, I push the fur ball away and roll onto my back, hopping back into that dreamy hot tub before the water gets cold.  By now, Tommy has lost all patience with me, and decides to crawl his twenty-pound body onto my chest and breathe his foul feline breath into my face until I am now fully awake.  Satisfied that I have no chance of going back to sleep, the fur ball slowly climbs off me and drops to the floor in search of a cozy chair to sleep in.

If I weren’t so tired from a lack of sleep I would laugh.  Twenty years of devoting my waking hours to raising my son showed me where I stand in the pecking order around my house.  His needs came first and I gladly took second place as most mothers always do.  Once my son left, however, I never considered that the first place throne would not pass to me.  Tommy knows his place in my household hierarchy…and apparently, I now know mine.