I am slowly embarking on my journey toward becoming a best-selling author. It was my childhood dream, and I refuse to give up.

At the workshop I attended in Key West at the Key West Literary Seminar, Jay Parini was taken aback by the friendships of my characters, and their age differences. My main character was in her early twenties, and her best friend was a sixty-year-old mechanic she picked up in Arizona. We won’t get into that.

Ann Hood remarked she thought I would be 85, judging by my writing sample. Because she read my work on Florida history before meeting me face-to-face, she assumed I was much older. But this happens to me a lot.

I have, in fact, forgotten how old I was in the past, unable to recall the number until I sat down with a calculator and considered it seriously. This happened when my father died the week before my birthday. Time stopped the moment I knew he was gone.

The other day, in his keynote lecture, Jess Walter joked that no one under twenty-something ever bothers to read Shakespeare. I thought about how wrong he was: Shakespeare was my favorite author when I was a kid.

I knew I was starved for intellectual stimulation, but being at Eckerd College Writers’ Conference, Writers in Paradise, has only made that clearer. How I long to be around other writers, and other thinkers, and other readers on a regular basis.

Today I hired a taxi to drive me to DeSoto Fort State Park, where I spent the afternoon exploring the historic fort and hanging out on the beach. I joked with the confused cabbie who picked me up, “I have to be the weird one who doesn’t want to go to the shops, instead I have a cab driver drop me off in the middle of nowhere.” He’d had trouble finding me.

Yesterday was the release date of Meet Me In the Garden, from Limitless Publishing. I spent the day listening to the wisdom of well-known authors, knowing that one day I want to reach that point.

One day I will get there.

And one day I will be a best-selling author.