Decision 2000
I’m still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. I thought I had it all figured out, a few years ago when I gave up thoughts of a lucrative career and focused on writing unsaleable books. But lately, with the preponderance of legalese on the television news stations, I’ve been second guessing my decade-old decision to give up law school and let the creative muse run amuck every day.
Being prone to analytical thinking, I’d early on gravitated toward the legal profession, with its endless delving into arcane particularities. But then I became a mommy, and instead of enrolling in law school, I enrolled in a co-op preschool and practiced cutting out stars rather than memorizing statutes.
Eventually, my kids graduated from preschool, just about the time the muse moved in, and filled my head with intriguing characters and fascinating plots. I’d found my true calling, or so I thought as I filled up a hard drive or two with half-completed novels. The analytical side of me was thoroughly engaged: figuring out what worked, what didn’t, what made one sentence scintillating, another drivel. Meanwhile, my long-ignored creative side was dancing the fandango with every new chapter.
But regrets have a way of sneaking up when least expected, and now, as I watch every Dershowitz-wannabe in the country chime in with their two cents–er, dollars–I’m wondering again if I made the right decision. Just like the 2000 presidential election, the choice is still unclear. Follow my heart, or my head?
Wait a minute! Isn’t that the very same delimma facing my character in my latest wip...? You know, where he can’t decide whether or not to....
Hmmm. What if...?
–Kathy Flake
November 2000