Beads on a necklace

I signed up to attend a writer's conference in Portland in August.

Encouraging me, sister Annie said that it was a bead of experience on the necklace of life. I like that.

I'm terrified for some unknown reason. No, terror is a bit overstated. Panic? It's just continuing education. But it's a lot of money for two days.

My friend Frances says, "There's always enough money in our house for professional development." I wrote back to her and put the words professional development in quotation marks. She wrote back and said, in effect, "What's wrong with you? This is your life!"

I told Jasara this morning that I either need to write or bag it and get a job in a grocery store. She countered with, "It's too soon for the job."

I don't know why I agonize so. It's similar to when I returned to college for the journalism degree. I agonized, I sought counsel. One friend and I parted ways when I switched my  major from psychology to journalism. She made disparaging comments about my choice, which in her mind, was clearly out of the "will of God."

My ultimate goal is to write during my retirement years, although admittedly, I'd rather just travel around and take photos. But there is a necessity interwoven in the desire: a need for money. Why did I choose writing then?

The writer's conference is meant to jumpstart my enthusiasm, wake me up to the desire to sit with my butt hurting half the day and pound out 1,000 words a day five days a week. Three hundred a day equals a book in one year.

I read today that we have all we need by the time we are four to write fiction: pain, loss, fear of death and a few others.  That brought up for me the loss of my father. Why did that have to happen? I won't know this side of wherever we are. One of my big questions.

The other will be: Was I really meant to be a writer?

Clearly, the answer is yes. Whether there are readers is another story.