I'm home. And, I'm so happy to be back that I actually found myself dancing through my apartment as I listened to music while unearthing my pajamas and miraculously finding a gorgeous Martinelli's apple juice in the fridge. This despite the fact that I am well and truly sick; I spent the flight back from Hawaii inhaling my nasal drip since I didn't have kleenexes, which luckily didn't bother my seat companion because he was too busy snoring the entire time (except for the first part of the flight, when he was not-quite-surreptitiously-enough spitting chew into a water bottle, making me want to throw up).
I can't believe my immune system made it through the entire winter, only to flame out on vacation. I don't want to be sick next week -- I want to get caught up before things get too out of hand, and coming back with a cold wasn't part of the plan. This is particularly the case since my colds inevitably move to my lungs and set up shop there for a couple of months, and I'm in no mood to deal with that. Bleh.
Really, on the surface, it appears that I had a bad vacation, given that I got sick, didn't write a thing, and will likely end up spending several hundred dollars fixing the rental car (the damage was immediately noticeable to them, even if I would have never seen it without the tag I got from the valet). But, on the contrary, I feel that it was exactly what I needed.
For one: Katie and I had a fabulous time. Verily she is a member of the race of Joseph (a term you would only know if you've also read all of the "Anne of Green Gables" books obsessively; it sort of means soulmates). I really hope that we do something like this every year, since she's one of my favorite people ever, even if she is so damn tall that we look silly together.
For another: in my feverish state, I had an important realization (I would call it an epiphany, but I supposedly had an epiphany yesterday, and how many epiphanies can you have in a row?) tonight. Or rather, two important realizations: a) I didn't think of business school once while I was on vacation, other than telling Katie I should probably go -- that seems to be an indication that writing is my real passion; and b) I believe that my writing dreams will come true because I can't see how they could fail. That's a dangerous hint of delusional mania, but hear me out -- I feel like I have some innate talent for this word-shaping business, but what was lacking before was the personal drive and the self-confidence to turn my latent talent into something useful. Somehow, somewhere along the line in the last year, I found that drive, and with it came the confidence that I could keep going with this.
So, to hell with the agent rejections -- I'm going to keep going, with both submitting the first book and writing the second. And, on the flight back to California, I did some more playing around with an idea for a young-adult fantasy series -- I've decided that I'm not going to be content just stealing Julia Quinn's career, but I want to take on J.K. Rowling as well.
This will all likely fall to dust tomorrow morning when the Tylenol Cold is out of my system and I'm left whimpering in bed with a sinus headache and a feeling of despair -- but I'm writing it down so that I can find the feeling again. Tomorrow I need to run errands and take care of things around the apartment so that I can get back into my real life, and then after that it's back to writing with a vengeance. Goodnight!
1 comment:
I ran into a Drake English Lit. grad who had high hopes of writing things that make people cry. He now writes error messages for MicroSoft.
Be a writer -- and go to law school. Many of the briefs filed with me are creative writing at its very best.
Post a Comment