“Son,” she said. “Stop dreaming of becoming a writer. Be an accountant. You’ll always have a job and pay your bills.”
At the tender age of 60, I decided to rebel. Now I’m miserable and broke. Why? Because I allowed writing to possess me.
It’s a woeful addiction. And there’s no Writers Anonymous to turn to.
On its completion, Vanished Gardens brought a whoop of joy from me. It became my third opus. Warm climes, ancient sites, quirky characters all enchant me. I wrote about a summer family holiday spent in England, Gibraltar and Andalusia, Spain.
My vignettes always compare and contrast the present to the past, mainly through characters I meet and those once met. To contrast against the bleak Heart of New York, this, my third book Vanished Gardens was meant to regale you with humour. Instead, once again, the writing took over and demanded its own direction.
“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
-Omar Khayyam
Vanished Gardens took on the role of bittersweet memories—the struggle to survive and escape the world of accounting and our last family trip together. One after another, the stories became a giddy rollercoaster of amusement one moment, pathos the next. I, like my readers, had no clue where the writing would take me. But the takeaway was always a silver lining—no matter how outrageous were the slings and arrows of fortune, sunshine always prevailed.
May sunshine prevail upon you too, and gratitude overcome you at the end.
