I'm back! After publishing and promoting my 4th book, Hearing Voices, I took a break. I needed to reassess my writing. Although I have published four books, I don't have a favorite genre. I've written nonfiction, fiction, poetry, plays, blogs and articles. I've written for money and for the sheer joy of it. I'm literally swimming in a sea of past works, ideas for new books, travel blogs, hundreds of poems and more. I can't even keep track of my body of work which I regret. That's why I decided it was time to take stock and figure out a way to organize and account for the work that I can still lay my hands on. This attempt at bringing it all together will be very time consuming but long overdue.
Currently, I'm in the process of closing down a website that I started in 2011 in order to promote my first book Finding the Gypsy in Me/ Tales of an International House Sitter. It's a short book explaining my life choice to retire early at age 54 from a career as a public school educator, sell everything that I owned and travel the world for four years. I actually started an international house sitting business to help defray the cost of my nomadic lifestyle. The website, Creative Paths to Freedom, hosts a travel blog as well where I write about longterm travel and living a debt free life. Through 2019, I managed the website, but during the last two years was writing less and less for the blog. Now, I'm trying to collect the blog posts and put them into a book or perhaps a series of books if for no other reason than for posterity's sake.
Then there's the hundreds of poems, literally hundreds, some of which I've lost over the years while others have been printed or stuffed in online folders. It's time to organize them as well. There's even a smaller chance that my books of poetry will be moneymakers than my travel blog books will be, but that's not what's driving my efforts to collect and catalogue my work. If money had been the motivating factor, I would've given up writing years ago.
It took me a long time to declare that I'm a writer. I was hesitant because I'm an avid reader as well. I've read the works of some of the most esteemed writers in the world and put them on a pedestal. That probably accounted for my reluctance to call myself a writer. Yet, as I attempt to collect my mountain of work, I'm forced to admit that not only am I a writer, but I'm a prolific writer. How did this happen? How did I produce such a body of work? Those questions bring me back to a single truth. I write not for money, or notoriety, or even for potential readers, although all of the above is much appreciated. Yet, that's not what drove me to produce so many words and stories. I write because I must. It's how I process life. It's how I express myself creatively. It's a compulsion that can't be ignored. That's what makes a prolific writer. I sit in a room alone and write when everyone else is doing other things. I'm in that room, writing, day after day after day. It's who I am. It's me. I didn't get to choose it. I was born a writer and over the course of almost 70 years, I wrote. No matter what else was going on, I was writing. What a journey it has been!
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