My daughter retorted: “Give it up Dad, your life is over; it’s time to give to your kids.”

That hit me hard; it angered me, and it hurt me. I was thirty-eight years old at the time, a few days from my thirty-ninth birthday, It’s bad enough that I come home from my job at the warehouse, worn and tired and feeling older than I am, but now I’m being told that my life is over.

It hit me hard. I had dreams of being a novelist. Been dabbling in writing for almost thirty years, (I’ve a few poems published in anthologies; sold a romantic piece to Blue Mountain Arts for a greeting card when I was in my early twenties, I received two hundred dollars for that.) I really had nothing to show for it. No career in writing like I wanted, or dreamed of.

So I got mad. Not just mad, but I swore I was going to do something about it. My life was not over and I sure as hell am not dead yet. I boiled over my daughter comment that evening and all the next day while I was at work. When I got home the next night, I started researching online schools and found a course for freelance writing. It was through the Penn Foster Correspondent School.

The course costs about six hundred and ninety bucks and the payments were reasonable. I signed up immediately. I didn’t tell my wife about it for a week. I was and still am determined to finish this course and gain a successful career in writing.

My main goal is learn the business side of writing: editing, marketing and such. I also wanted to work on my grammar and punctuation skills, sentence structure. My plan is to engross myself in the freelance course; gain all the skills I need for a career in writing, whether I write my novels, or just articles and short stories for magazines. I will be a successful writer.

Since I’ve started my course, I’ve completed five short stories and three articles. I’m researching the writers market for submission guidelines and markets that are looking for my article subjects and story genres.

I still haven’t been able to write everyday but I am doing it much more frequently. I bounce back in fourth between my file of novels, short stories, and articles so that I am almost regularly writing something.

I do not feel my journey as a writer, up to this point, has been wasted, but I have realized it can be a long road when chasing a dream.