You know that feeling when you’ve finally found your passion, and you put everything into it? You wake up in the morning excited to write, draw, create music, mentor youth, play sports, build a house – whatever your creative passion is. It’s the best feeling in the world. Creativity colors and brightens our every day. And despite certain failures, naysayers, the car breaking down, family drama, or your day job, you keep working on your passion. You keep going. This is how you know that you have truly found your passion.

And if you haven’t found yours yet, keep trying everything until you find your thing. Everyone is born with creativity. Everyone.

I’ve always loved reading and writing, but it wasn’t until I turned 40, my babies were teenagers, and my health took a nose dive, that I realized I wasn’t doing what I really wanted to be doing. My day job as a legal assistant wasn’t fulfilling anymore. I felt like I used up all my energy during the day not making a difference, not being creative, and not contributing to the world. By the time I got home I was too exhausted physically and mentally to do anything.

Then one day I entered a poetry contest on a whim and won! This was a small step toward working on my creativity. It felt good to not only write the poem, but have the acknowledgement that it was good.

I discovered NaNoWriMo and have done (and won!) each year since. I needed the competition, support, and feeling of accomplishment that the contest provided. NaNoWriMo and everyone running it and participating in it rocks!

Since that poetry contest years ago I have published three books, with five more slated to be published this year. I thoroughly enjoy the writing process (I’ve even made friends with editing, which I absolutely HATED in the beginning) and it has filled my creative well, given me a purpose to get up each morning, and kept my health on track. I have truly found my passion.

I listened the Front Row Factor podcast with Jon Vroman episode #95 last year (I love podcasts!) and heard Azul Terronez being interviewed. Azul is a book coach, author, TEDx speaker, podcaster, and co-founder of the Authors Writing Academy. While I was listening to Azul and Jon talk I was thinking-I’ve already written a book. Several fiction books. But something creative sparked within me, and an idea for a non-fiction book was birthed. Azul talked about our why as authors. Sure, my fiction books I want to entertain and transport youth and adults to a life outside of our solar system (I love science fiction as well as space science – so my YA SF is space opera). But I realized I wanted my readers, especially young adults to find and protect their own creative passions. With schools focusing so much on grades and tests, spelling and grammar – our natural wild imagination and creativity is lost, bent, devalued, and destroyed in many cases.

As I got to know Azul through his Authors Writing Academy and 5 day writing challenge, he showed me that although there are a ton of other writing and creativity books out there, there’s only one me. My unique story and experience would make my book different and interesting.

So, I’m publicly stating that I’m committing to the (to me) scary thing of writing a non-fiction book. By the end of May 2018 I will have a draft of this book. Not only is it a challenge because I have two other fiction books I’ve got scheduled to write in this same time period, but this book has already turned out to be highly emotional for me to write. I’m using stories from my past, so that in itself is bringing up events and emotions I had forgotten about, but it’s emotional as well because both my parents passed away years ago so I don’t have too many relatives to help fill in my memory gaps.

So, here’s to an interesting twelve weeks ahead! I hope to give updates as I go along, maybe some of the road blocks or things I learn along the way will help someone else in their creative journey to keep going!

What are your creative passions? How do you protect your time with your creativity? How has your creativity made you whole/healthy/happy?

-Heather

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