Follow Your Passion

What is passion? It’s a concept that I have been thinking a lot about lately. Passion. What does passion mean? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines passion as an “intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction” as well as an “object of desire or deep interest.” The COVID-19 pandemic has caused me to think about a lot of things, but lately, it has inspired me to focus on my passions. I feel it in my bones that a grand pivot is coming on, so I better find out what my passions are before the world makes a collective 90-degree turn without me. 

The world is changing, and I want to change with it. However, the changes that I want are personal. I don’t want to sleepwalk through my life anymore. I no longer want to sell my time to institutions that suck out my soul. What I want to do is follow my dreams. I don’t want to die and say that I didn’t live the life I always wanted.   

I’ve always loved writing. I’ve written poetry since the time I was young. I would write because I felt compelled to do it. Writing was a source of self-fulfillment as well as a means to an end. I always have random thoughts swirling around my brain, so writing helps me purge those thoughts to make room for more. 

I’ve tried other hobbies throughout my adult life, but writing is the one constant that has never waivered. I see myself the best when I see my words written across a page. Writing is not only who I am, but it is also who I want to be. I want to be a writer. It is my passion.

I used to be an avid traveler, but a raging health pandemic pretty much took that hobby away. I have a cabinet full of notebooks that I would write in whenever I went someplace, and I have been working on organizing those thoughts into full-fledged novels. 

Once I started writing, I wasn’t able to stop. I wrote out nearly 250,000 words before I realized that I wasn’t George R.R. Martin. I always knew that I liked writing, but I had no idea that I was so prolific. I kind of wish now that I framed my stories to be fantasy tales, as that seems to be the only kind of books that people like to read these days. Alas, the only thing fantasy aspect about my travel tales is that they happened in the past and on a planet that I barely recognize anymore. 

My first volume of Memory Road Trip is complete and ready for a publisher. I’ve sent the manuscript to plenty of agents and independent presses, but no one has replied with an offer. Thus, I am left holding my book and wondering how I can get the thing into other people’s hands. I feel as though I am standing on a metaphorical street corner with a cardboard sign and begging for eyes instead of money. 

Does writing mean less if no one reads it? Yes. Maybe. No. Those are all the correct answers. I believe that writing means more to an author than it does to a reader. I believe that I wrote something decent. Wait. Let me rephrase that. I know that I wrote something decent. I wrote a book, a whole goddamn book. I’ve never done that before, and it is something that I want to do again. I have enough stories in me to keep going. I want to keep going until the day that I die. It is what I want out of life. It’s not even about the money. I don’t care about making money with my words. I just want to share my thoughts. I’ve been to places that many people have not. I’ve been inside pre-historic painted caves, Neolithic subterranean structures, abandoned ghost towns, and Sewer Museums. Here, I will share an excerpt from my book to demonstrate my musing:

Before I returned home from France, there was one thing left that I wanted to do, and that was to spend some quality time at the Paris Sewer Museum. I had never been to a sewer museum before, and just the idea of such a place made me want to vomit and smile simultaneously. I almost couldn’t believe that such a museum existed when I read about it in a guidebook because most cities don’t tout their sewers as tourist destinations. Heck, I don’t even know where the sewer entrance is in Phoenix, where I live, because it’s not somewhere that I would ever think to swing by and spend an afternoon in. Actually, I have to correct myself and say that I have been to a sewer museum before. However, it wasn’t a sewer museum, per se, but it was a sewage treatment plant. When I was in high school, in like eleventh grade or something, our class was split into two separate groups and got sent off on two entirely different field trips. Half the class got to visit the Kikkoman Soy Sauce Factory, and the other half got to visit a sewage treatment plant. I just assumed that both groups were sent to a sewage treatment plant and got to come back to school smelling like they just swam in a toilet for two hours, but, nope, that was just our lucky group. When we returned to school, my half had to tolerate the other half’s smug looks as they ran around the hallways smiling and waving their little packets of soy sauce and demanding us to show them what we brought back from our trip. Our group came back empty-handed, aside from the story about how we learned that there were bugs that ate poop, and we saw hoards of them in large cisterns at the sewage treatment plant and that they could smell our shirts if they wanted to. Needless to say, the Kikkoman group was not nearly as jealous of us as we were of them. 

MEMORY rOAD tRIP, CHAPTER SIX EXCERPT

My book Memory Road Trip is available as e-book or paperback! Buy it either at Amazon or at most major retailers.

thank you for reading!