Pursuing Dreams

Setting goals....making pitches...getting things done....Springtime, like the New Year, seems to infuse everything with a new energy, doesn't it? The world seems to speed up.

Here in Lancaster, PA, the forsythia are about to bloom, crocuses are beaming bright, and green shoots and blossoms are everywhere on the cusp of bursting. I love this time of year!

Not surprisingly, I end up setting a lot of my novels in the springtime, that time of year when promise seems just around the corner. My May release, Fire Me!, is set in springtime Washington, DC. For those of you who live there or have visited DC in the spring, you know it's especially beautiful, with the feel of a European city in some quarters--tree canopies hanging heavy over streets, cherry blossoms floating in the air.

Springtime always seems to ask a question: what next? And that's the question my protagonist, Anne Wyatt, has to answer by the end of the novel. She starts the story thinking she's headed in one direction and faces a crossroads at the end.

In fact, she had all but abandoned the field in which she'd studied (art) and finds herself constantly questioning that decision by the evening of this one-day tale.

This got me to thinking how many of us start out on one path and end up on another. Believe it or not, I started out as....an opera singer! I studied voice at a music conservatory and then bumped around various performing groups (including the Washington Opera, which performs in the Kennedy Center) before realizing that my true dream was writing.

I arrived at this point by asking myself a simple question -- if you won the Lottery tomorrow, what "work" would you still want to pursue? Writing novels was the answer, as clear and bright as those yellow buds outside my window.

So what vocation would you still pursue, even if you were independently wealthy? I'd love to know!