I’ve come to a recent conclusion that having a dream, and I mean a real, bona fide, can’t eat, can’t sleep, border-line insane, dream is one of the most painful delights imaginable.  I should stamp the words “dissatisfaction” onto my forehead.  With my home life I’m one person.  I’m completely happy with my wonderful husband Kimsey, and couldn’t sleep without the two sets of dog paws that dig into my back each night.  However, in that gnawing place in my stomach,and the dark corners of my mind, it is like Fitzgerald said, “3 a.m. day after day.” I’m another person, constantly reeling and examining my life, wondering if the pen in my hand will ever put an end to the torture.  It’s always “gut-check” time in my world and I never let it rest.  I want to be a writer.  I want to see my name written on the covers when I walk into Borders or Barnes and Noble.  Frankly, sometimes I avoid these places because I’m still not paying their bills.  I have openly cursed the names of authors I love, because I want to feel just an inkling of that feeling they felt when they knew they’d made it.  I cry when I watch people accept their first oscars, or hit home runs in Yankee Stadium.  Recently when Djokovic beat Nadal in the U.S. Open chills ran down my spine.  What does it feel like when that moment is upon a person?  Sometimes I think I’m so close to my dream I can smell it, and other times I consider flushing my manuscript down the toilet.  There are days I’m content and think I would be okay doing something else I like and am good at, but then it gets dark outside, and the gremlins that live deep inside me whisper again.     I often envy people who do things the correct way, and I  don’t mean this in any self-righteous or pretentious manner….it’s just the truth.  I haven’t the time for bullshit.   Many times I have asked myself why I couldn’t be happy just finishing college one of the four times I have gone back, or why I can’t be 100% satisfied with the job I really do adore.  The answer is, I just can’t.  I can’t everytime I try because I have “a thing” I can’t stop doing. When one day I left an Evironmental Science class with no recollection of having been there, and found a completed short story in my notebook I knew I was just in the wrong place.  Even in literature classes, though I loved discussing other author’s work, I couldn’t pull myself away from needing to write my own…immediately.  Maybe if I had fiished I would already have more contacts in the literary world.  Maybe my thesis would have been published.  There are a million arguments for it, but it just didn’t make me tick.  Apparenly, the thing that does is the uncertain, grueling excitement that a closet-nerd, a once-upon-a-time cheerleader from the speck sized town of Candler, NC might just make a very big mark on the literary world…her way.