And what do you want to be when you grow up?
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniYanno, if anyone had asked me, back when I was a whippersnapper, what I'd be doing when I was fifty-five, I'd've probably told them that I'd be retired (which, if I'd stuck with the State of Maryland Merit System, I would have been, a couple of years, now) and the owner of a bookstore and modest Victorian cottage in Cape May, New Jersey.
Nice goal, kid, though I hear Cape May isn't what it used to be, beach-wise, what with all the medical waste washing up. And the town's a little iffy nowadays, too. The people from Away, they ruin everything...
I don't think I would have told my hypothetical inquisitor that there were fifteen published books with my name on the cover and more short stories than I feel like counting at the moment.
And while fifteen books published since 1988 is pretty pathetic by the standards of the day, it's interesting that the younger me thought it much more likely that I'd own a bookstore than write a novel.
As it happens, I owned -- well, co-owned -- a bookstore. It didn't work out.
The writing thing -- I'm not so sure that worked out, either. Considering that I'm back doing the secretary thing several years after, in an alternate universe, I'm in comfortable bookish retirement at an turn-of-the-century seaside resort, I guess the argument can be made that -- no, that didn't work out, either.
Which leaves me, at fifty-five, wondering what it is that I want to be when I grow up, this time.
Nice goal, kid, though I hear Cape May isn't what it used to be, beach-wise, what with all the medical waste washing up. And the town's a little iffy nowadays, too. The people from Away, they ruin everything...
I don't think I would have told my hypothetical inquisitor that there were fifteen published books with my name on the cover and more short stories than I feel like counting at the moment.
And while fifteen books published since 1988 is pretty pathetic by the standards of the day, it's interesting that the younger me thought it much more likely that I'd own a bookstore than write a novel.
As it happens, I owned -- well, co-owned -- a bookstore. It didn't work out.
The writing thing -- I'm not so sure that worked out, either. Considering that I'm back doing the secretary thing several years after, in an alternate universe, I'm in comfortable bookish retirement at an turn-of-the-century seaside resort, I guess the argument can be made that -- no, that didn't work out, either.
Which leaves me, at fifty-five, wondering what it is that I want to be when I grow up, this time.
