Who and what I want to be…

What do I want to be when I grow up? When I was a little girl I was asked this question and usually replied with a host of different occupations~~depending on the age at the time and the current vogue occupations. What did I want to be?

As a little girl I can remember having the same dreams most little girls had. I wanted to be a dancer or an actress or a singer and make movies and be on television. I also wanted to be a mommy with a big house and a beautiful yard…very much a fulltime job on its own. Sometimes I wanted to be a cowgirl and sometimes I wanted to be other people…guess this would go under the actress category!

I wanted to be an airline stewardess throughout most of my teen years. The thought of traveling to distant lands and exploring our country appealed to me and I knew as a stewardess I would spend endless hours traveling as my job but I’d also have access to great benefits which included air travel for little or no expense! It was the time of the great international airlines, Pan Am was my airline of choice…Delta was my national airline of choice. Unfortunate for me, the minimum age requirement was far above the 17 years old that I had been at graduation. And as I grew older I developed a fear of heights…not a great way to start a career flying the skies!

I considered law enforcement. My family for generations had law officers in one capacity or another. My father had been a cop, my great-grandfather had been a jailer, my uncle had formed a K-9 unit for a large city, more family than I can recount had positions on forces locally and away…I loved the investigative nature of the job and I had always felt a strong connection to these roots. Unfortunately, yet again, that didn’t seem feasible with my aversion to the drama and the seriousness of the scenes that I would have seen. Nope, not for me.

My vocation for many years dealt with accounting and bookkeeping…lots and lots of numbers! I was good at it, but it had never been my first choice as a career. There came a time when I knew this, too, was not a career for me. I could fill a book with advice on the detrimental stress and anxiety of working in a field that you shouldn’t be in. But that is an entirely different story.

My point is, throughout all these years I loved to write. As a child I would keep diaries, as a teen I’d write stories, as a young adult I kept journals and wrote long flowing letters and dreamed of the characters I’d see forming in my imagination. As a mother I took pride in the creativeness of my children and, perhaps because of my interest in writing, encouraged them to seek creative outlets. I continued to love novels, especially romantic novels, and to dream of a future…perhaps as an author.

Today, I write. I follow that elusive dream of being an author. I have kept my eyes open and learned about how to structure my stories, how to bring not only my characters but the places they reside to life, how to use social networking, about how to submit manuscripts and to write queries. I have even submitted work before…and I continue to imagine worlds of characters. Deep within, I believe this is what I was meant to be. I’ve learned that I am not the first in my family…going back many generations…to love to write. I doubt I will be the last.

Never give up on your aspirations!

Just being me,

KW