I never intended to take time off from writing but life, as I have observed before, sometimes just intrudes. For the past few weeks I have had this nagging voice in my head and this desperate feeling that I was missing out on something. I was and I knew it; I was not writing. There are times when you have to stop and consider some decisions that can have a major impact on your life, its quality, its nature, its very reason for being lived. I have been having one of those moments. I believe that it is the undecided things that cause the greatest unsettlement. For a while I was able to hide in my writing, allowing the creative process to protect me from what was happening, but even that proved to be insufficient eventually. Life is a like a juggernaut, it just moves on whether you want it to or not. This is not some deep philosophical observation, rather an acceptance of a truth that I already knew. I had to face the changes that were coming my way.

Throughout my life I have always tried to be both an optimist and a positive person. I could have surrendered to living a life circumscribed by the attitudes of others to a disabled person, accepting the meagre benefits handed out by the system as the sum total of my worth, but I chose not to. I elected to have a life worth living. I am glad that I did because the positives have largely outweighed the negatives, well, in my personal life if not in my work-life. I am not surprised that I find myself making such a decision again, only with a view to making a pretty dramatic change; I want to write for a living!

So far writing has been little more than a hobby, a very rewarding one intellectually speaking, but a little lean on the royalties if I am honest. Becoming a best-selling author is still a goal to be achieved and I am not giving up on it, I am, however, looking at alternative forms of writing other than penning novels. Now that my mind is made up on the issue, I am going to start looking at the kind of opportunities that exist out there, and which are largely unknown to me, for someone who is quite good with words, likes being creative, can do research, has a wide and perhaps even an eclectic mix of interests, and really just enjoys tapping keys and seeing the words that appear!