Living Life Backwards

I had a bad week, so out of desperation, a hopelessly weak mind and search for positive thoughts, I actually looked up my horoscope. I know... I know... This isn't 1970.

I will add that I honestly don't believe this stuff, I think, kind of, not really, well...perhaps only the good parts. But I am from way back in the time when the best pick up lines in the bars in Manhattan Beach and Marina Del Rey California were, "Hey baby. What's your sign?" Now, picture this guy in white jeans and white shoes, dark shirt opened to button number five, lots of gold chains and blonde hair not from the summer sun, but from a box of Summer Blonde. The band is playing Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World," and the cocktail of choice is a banana daquiri.

Now I have to admit my dark secret and write about this because I laughed out loud today when I read my horoscope, which said the following:


August 14, 2006You are both a highly sensitive and a highly intellectual person, Jill. This is a wonderful combination, and part of what makes you the superstar that you are. Today's planetary positions challenge you to think about how you can best combine these two key components of your personality. Have you ever considered writing as a career? It might provide just the sort of balance you seek. Give it some thought or, better yet, simply start writing and see whether or not it suits you.

****

Now of course I choose to believe the highly intellectual part, being highly intellectual. The highly sensitive part is actually what gave me a bad week to begin with. The truth is: I have been a writer since 1986, twenty years. And published for eighteen of those twenty years. What I can't decide is whether I should feel reassured that my career choice was in the stars, or aware that my horoscope is running behind for a couple of decades. It's not exactly rocket science to divine that particular career choice for me from the cosmos.

After all, isn't everything right in retrospect anyway? Oh, that we could live our lives backwards. When people ask if you could have one wish, Jill, what would it be? That might be mine. I know world peace is more politic, especially now, but I think I might like to be 21 again after being 50. Well, maybe twenty five, not twenty one.

I have not posted for a while, lost in the book business and life and using all my words on the next novel, which I must have done in October. Book tour was in Southern California, where it was so hot I thought I was in the middle of the Mojave Desert on the the 4th of July, a place my young husband once foolishly took me dirt bike riding when were only a couple of years into our marriage. He hadn't learned the benefits of a five star hotel on a beach yet, and I hadn't acquired the heart or the ability to look him in the eye and say no. Picture a tent trailer, no water, no shower, wearing black leather when it was 116, and coming back to camp with so much dirt on our faces we had goggle outlines around our eyes and probably a few bugs in our teeth. (The person who invented Fear Factor must have been dirt bike riding once.)

But back to book events: as many of the authors blog, meeting readers is and always has been a highlight to this career, even when it is 109 degrees in Mission Veijo at 11AM and 92 on the beach in Santa Monica. Writing books, especially fiction, is a very lonely job, one where you don't know if what you have to say will touch anyone else. The eager, gracious, shy, enthusiastic, incredibly encouraging, emotional, and grateful readers at book events remind you there is a reason why you do this.

Thank you to all the readers of all books. We live inside a world where words have great meaning. Words are the tools with which I paint my worlds, draw my characters and sketch my stories. Being my tools, my medium, I like to remember the true value of each word and phrase, the connotations and hues, nuances. I like the feelings they evoke. Love. Dad. Yum. Thank you. Yes. And cease fire.

JB