Finding the 25th Hour

I’ve been busy.

Edits, writing, the day job, household stuff, and I just got back from a girl’s weekend in Nashville.

All this activity has made me think about what’s truly important. I’m the one who wants to do everything. As a high school student, I vacillated between becoming a stay at home mom with twelve kids or moving to New York City to be a fashion buyer for a big department store.

I took business classes, college prep classes, and home economics classes. I was a renaissance girl. I still enjoy crocheting and other fabric crafts. In college, I was the same jumble of classes.

Eventually, I earned my degree in Political Science, Public Administration and after a few false starts, built a career in social services. When I divorced, I decided to change my career as well. Currently, I have an administrative job in the automotive field. Not exactly the career of an overachiever’s dreams.

Until I started becoming serious about writing.

Books have been my salvation and my hope since I started reading. Reading kept me company when I was left alone as a child – brothers and sisters moved out on their own, parents busy with their own lives. Get lost in a story, and the darkness outside didn’t seem so scary.

The day job pays the rent. And the electricity. When I went through chemotherapy for breast cancer several years ago, someone asked me if I was still working. My response was yes. I was still eating, and I was still paying for my utilities, and my rent, so not working was never an option.

As a writer, it’s the same. But I have hope. Each sale, either short story or full manuscript, moves me closer to that dream that practical me never believed could come true.

Today I’m a writer. Even if it’s squeezed in between all the other roles I play and completed in that miracle 25th hour I find each day.

How about you? What was your childhood dream?