Never Give Up on Your Dreams

The bottles of drinks at my launch party on November 4th will have the label announcing the name of my book, but with an interesting vintage – the year 1978. That was the year I started writing, Lone Falcon on a typewriter for my Novel Writing class at the University of Washington. Forty years later it is finally being published. Someone in my writer’s critique group asked if it was called, “Lone Pterodactyl when I started it.

It’s not that it took that long to write. It’s just what happens after college. Life happened. Moving to California, marrying, raising two sons, and returning to graduate school kept the book pushed aside. Then I took the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge where you write a 50,000-word book in one month. I kinda cheated. I picked up my old typewritten manuscript and began transposing it on my computer. As I typed it she found the words, “my car’s the Datsun” I stopped dead in my tracks. I thought I’d have to update that, but a voice inside me said, “No! Keep it in the 70s.” I confess I didn’t complete the book in the month challenge, but a friend gave me the deadline of having it finished by the next CWC (California Writer’s Club) meeting for her to read. So, I did. Yet it was merely a 15,000-word piece.

I originally wrote it in protest of all the Young Adult (YA) books of the times which said, “your parents and their beliefs are all wrong. Do what your friends and the times say.” In the wisdom I acquired in my years of mothering, earning my Master’s degree, and becoming a Minister, I adjusted my theme to living your own truth, not what others and society may tell you. I fell in love with the idea of choosing your own path. The metaphor of steering your own boat led me to the sport of rowing and its navigator the coxswain.

The 70s really fit this theme since it was the time when women were given so many choices with the events of Title IX, Billie Jean King’s: Battle of the Sexes, birth control, and Roe Vs. Wade. It made my character’s choices even more difficult.

 Also in this later decade of my life I've achieved another dream of being hired by a church as its Diaconal Minister. A Diaconal Minister is one whose mission is to bring the love, service, and justice of Christ into the world. So you can see: 

It is never too late to give up on your dreams.