in retrospect, it all seems easy. it all seems... preordained. but it didn't feel that way then.
i had my Sign, i got my severance, AND unemployment. for the first time in months, i was able to put money away. and yet, it was still an enormous leap of blind faith to first of all, acknowledge the Sign, and then - to turn my attention utterly away from everything everyone had ever told me about what you are SUPPOSED to do to succeed in the world. it was the scariest thing i ever did.
but i had no idea as i walked away from corporate america and into the dark that anything was going to work out. i had promised jenn to turn a new proposal in to her at the beginning of january. i had thirty days to create something out of what felt like not much. it took an enormous amount of Something - courage, faith, and a kind of dogged understanding that i couldn't fail any worse than i'd already failed before - to not only believe that i'd received a Sign (which was why i asked for an obvious one) and then, to follow through on it, in the kind of wholehearted, make-it-or-break-it passion that i had not ever given my writing, because it didn't seem like i should.
the week my severance ran out, i got an offer for a three-book deal from harlequin. the last book in that series came out in december 2006, but that's another story. currently i have another manuscript under consideration at another major house. just yesterday, a friend of mine and i decided to collaborate on a political thriller. (she's into politics, im into thrills.)
but what took me a long time to see, was that the Sign wasn't just permission to open to my creativity, or to embrace my writing in a whole new way. the Sign also opened me to my intuitve gifts and abilities, and it was from that time on that i began to allow myself since childhood to acknowledge my Gifts, to claim the Awareness that i have always on some level had.
for me, writing is the doorway - my Sign was the welcome mat. i believe there's a similar place for all of us, and it's a question of finding it, and being brave enough to claim it when it appears.
and furthermore, the war must end. blessed be.
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