You can't always get what you want

So, as if I wasn’t busy enough trying to write my books, look after a veteran, deal with the death of my beloved bloodhound Zoey, the cards I hand paint and sell and I partnered with a friend to make a Tarot deck. Yes, I am too flipping busy. Amazingly busy for a woman who has no real employment and spends most of her day trying to figure out her side hustles and get her Veteran to the numerous VA appointments.

So, on Facebook the time waster I just can’t quit, I had someone ask me how I do all of this and why.

I think my answer goes back to Joseph Campbell in his PBS special “The Power of Myth”. He said that “When you follow your bliss doors will open for yourself where there were none.” I had spent a large part of my life working jobs that were meaningless, boring, and soul crushing. I got off the merry-go-round of dealing with the dialysis industry where, I didn’t take care of human beings, as much as run an assembly line. It ate me alive to see changes that made me go from being a caregiver to a hurried automation with no time to care about her patients. I knew I had to change my life in a big way.

I walked away from security of steady pay, laced with dread of going to work at the dialysis unit to being able to work at my creative endeavors that make me feel whole. Is it easy being broke most of the time and reading rejection letters? Nope, but at least I don’t wake up thinking, “Crap, I woke up. I have to go to work at that job.” I get to sell my art and write, that’s worth shopping at goodwill and eating ramen for me.

I hold no illusions that I am writing world class fiction, but I get to write. My artwork has taken off and sells. I am growing this aspect of my life. I carefully manage my projects and have developed a critical eye for what I do. I am my worst critic and struggle to not give in to that little voice that says, “God you suck.” That voice for too many years keep me working in an aspect of the healthcare industry that made be depressed and at one point suicidal.

Writing gives me the ability to take the ingredients of my life and write, what I hope, are great characters. I know what it is to “bang my head against the wall” so to speak and get nowhere. To have great dreams that are foiled by the unexpected. I have had my course charted in life only to have death, divorce, and a betrayal tear up the plans and throw them aside. I think that few humans can say they never had plans disrupted by unseen things.

My protagonist Piety has some life under her belt and she too had had her life turned upside down. Piety has not come this far in my book without some scars emotionally and a few physical. In writing her, I try to put that emotion of being overwhelmed and fearful, yet excited at the prospect of trying something outrageously new. Discovering you are from a long line of witches would be a lot to deal with, trying to learn witchcraft at an age when most witches, have been practicing on their own for years would be daunting, I would think.

While I doubt anyone really reads my brain drippings here , yet I feel this urge to talk about what I do and why , maybe to connect to other people who feel the need to create other worlds to play in . Maybe it’s born of just wanting to let someone know that I to have stories to tell and seeing if they answer back, “ I love a good story , please tell me one.”