To Dance With the Barn Owl

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer

Photo by John P. Weiss

One wrong turn can change the entire trajectory of your life.

Exhausted, sipping a bitter cup of gas station coffee, I was determined to get home by daybreak. I don’t like driving through the night, but the writer’s conference I attended for the last three days ate up most of my accrued vacation time. I needed to get home, leaving just one day to unpack, do laundry, and sleep before work the following day.

Not that I love my work.

Being a copywriter for a digital company is a means to an end. A bridge to the future, when my novels hopefully reach a broader audience and financial success.

GPS is a wonderful thing when it works. But sometimes high mountains, poor cellular range, and the alchemy of fate set you on a different course and a wrong turn.

The turn off the main highway felt astray, but whenever I ignore GPS, I usually regret it. So I kept driving for miles, as the road narrowed and the surrounding countryside disappeared into curtains of pitch black.

“Where the hell am I?” I said to myself. Then the GPS went haywire and its little voice blurted out “Re-calculating…proceed to the nearest route.”