Taking A Leap of Faith

I leave for Hawaii today. I've never been. I've always wanted to go. Now I'm spooked. The longest I've been away from home in over a decade was 9 days spent with my friend Lex at a writers' conference. This year we're forgoing conferences for a holiday together, just us two, traveling to Hawaii then seeing sites in Australia, where she lives. For MONTHS. Not days.

For some strange reason, I'm also writing different things this year. I've completed a romance for a line I've never written for, and I'm working on a women's fiction in which the protagonist will either be hated or loved by those who read the book. It opens with a failed suicide attempt. How ghastly, right? To be that desperate, that alone, that selfish, and work up the nerve then wake up from a coma having to face the same life, same situations that prompted the suicide attempt?

 

Both books have been challenges for me. I've written erotic romance for so long (both male/female and male/male) that I'm questioning my sanity. Why substitute the genre that feeds me for one that may or may not bring any profit?

 

Ah, there's the rub. I'm not writing for money this time. SURE, I'll take it! But this time I'm writing strictly for the love of the genre, and it scares me. What if I don't succeed? Ack. What if I DO? I'll be expected to continue, for one thing. I may miss what I used to write, for another.

 

The marvelous Mona Sizer, who writes as Deana James, once told me that heroes always have their flaws and villains their reasons. When I apply that to my writing, I come up with true love has much to conquer - lol - and it's not such a bad thing if I revert now and then to writing what has afforded me conferences in the past. Either way I go, in other words, I'm following a goal…to feed my soul or feed my wallet. My worry, of course, is that one will starve and the other flourish, when what I wish is for both to feel full.

 

How about you? What are your reasons for writing? To feed your soul or your wallet? Just to have something to do or to do something with purpose? It doesn't hurt to take a self-inventory now and then. Sometimes it gives us perspective and we can either pick up where we left off or venture into unknown territory.

For me…I'm working on that women's fiction and another romance while I'm gone. I also plan to collaborate with my dear friend, Lex. Wish us luck as we journey into the unknown, and stay tuned for photos of our trips.