Listen to your heart...

Think with your head, but listen to your heart when it comes to those tough "What am I going to be when I grow up?" kinds of questions. Just like your body has the built-in capability to heal a cut, your heart truly knows your heart's desire.

As a child, I bounced from one perspective career to another, dismissing each in turn until I chose a path. I had a dream to write. In an "Anne Shirley"-esque way, I sat on a rock beside my house with a notebook and pen, creating characters and crafting plots. I have a box full of my childhood scribblings. It sat in storage under the stairs for a decade before I put it into my office to organize and sort. My office is beginning to fill up with all the odds and ends which need organizing and sorting. My hopes for mental clarity through de-cluttering are getting buried as the clutter is simply relocated to a different part of my house. It's hard to let go. Stuff. Dreams. My current trajectory.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my way. My path toward writing veered sharply to the left, toward an office and a desk and a pantsuit. Among the spreadsheets and reports and meetings, I forgot about my dream. But my dream didn't forget about me. It lay dormant in the back of my mind, waiting.

The heroine, Marisa Clements, in my soon-to-be-released paranormal romance novel A Vampire's Tale learned to listen to her heart. But this lesson was learned the hard way. Instead of following her own dreams, she first tries to walk the path that was expected of her. School. Respectable job. Acceptance of a life of drudgery. Until she hears a voice in her head which opens her heart, once again, to the possibility of pursuing her own dreams. She realizes life is too short not to be happy. Unless you're an immortal vampire like my hero, Corgan Halton.

Marisa's lesson on following her dreams was my lesson as well. During the course of writing this book, I had an epiphany. My body began a systematic malfunction. It was a protective mechanism induced to remove me from an unsafe situation. I didn't listen at first, but after two years I got the message. My body was not the only part suffering. My mind had long accepted the office and desk and pantsuit, but once removed, I became open to other possibilities. Limitless possibilities. I once again had the opportunity to ask myself "What am I going to be when I grow up?"

It's never too late to choose to follow your dreams. The March 22, 2017 release of A Vampire's Tale proves it.