Now

The last inspiration on my desktop is one I shared before.  It means a great deal to me, the girl who gave up ballet in second grade because I had started too late to be really good at it and the teenager who gave up violin in seventh grade because all of the really serious players had started learning when they were toddlers and the young woman who never really thought twice in college about a serious acting career because all of the good movies had already been made.

Let me tell you about the woman (yes, the woman - she wrote under a pen name) who puts a friendly, imaginary hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye and says these words quite clearly to me when I see them.  But first, I'd like you to look at her.

Mary Ann's father assumed when she was five that she would never be lovely and able to marry; so he sent her away to boarding school to be educated.  In those all-female boarding schools, she learned Latin and Greek and logic, and she read with appetite.  When her mother died, Mary Ann was sixteen.  Her formal education ended then so that she could keep house for her father.  Though she kept reading and educating herself and questioning the religious teaching of her youth, she remained obedient and quiet at home until she was 30.

Then her life began.

When the man who had told her she was too ugly to marry and refused to hear her spiritual doubts or to let her live and work independently finally died, Mary Ann went to Switzerland and stayed there for a good, long while.  When she came back, she found work as an editor and translator and found love with a man who would remain faithful to her for twenty years, until his death.  She published the first of seven acclaimed novels when she was thirty-nine.

I am thirty-eight.

So when Mary Ann Evans tells me that it's never too late for me to be who I might have been, she lifts me from the inactive despair of believing that my opportunities have passed me by long ago.  I believe her, because she lived what she said.  She died at the age of sixty having made her mark on the world.  If I live only that long, I want to spend every day of the twenty-two years left to me doing what I love.  I want to open my eyes to the world.  I want to connect with the valuable, individual human beings around me.  I want to choose my innermost desires.  I want to wow the Muse.  I want to do all that is in my heart.  It's never too late to start.

Read Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death at Amazon or at Smashwords, and read the first chapter free at my website, where the paperback edition will be available starting next week!