I’ll be honest – I like to go back and re-read my musings once I’ve posted them here on my blog. Sometimes they joggle my memory of past adventures or give me an idea for a blog post about new adventures. The most recent, The Write to Roam, struck me differently after about the third read. I realized I already know how to ‘live’ on the road, in a sense. Over the last eleven years (beginning in Aug 2005) I’ve crisscrossed the U.S. four times, in the form of moving to new places, seeking new adventures, all while honing my writing skills. Whether in a U-Haul truck or my own vehicle, I ventured out beyond whatever borders encased my life at the time. Four cross-country trips later (not including mini-excursions to neighboring states), I find myself once again feeling the call of the road. Only it’s different now because I want to actually LIVE on the road, in a 30-40 ft RV, and to focus more on my writing, both fiction and nonfiction. And I want to tell stories. After all, isn’t that why most of us writers write to begin with, to tell others’ stories?

Pictures speak a thousand words, it has been said. In the case of my picture-taking while on road trips, I’ve written a novel equivalent to War and Peace. I have either lived in (bold) or traveled through these states: MA, CT, VT, ME, NH, RI, NY, NJ, OH, VA, WV, MD, DC, PA, DE, FL, TN, IN, IL, AK, GA, MN, TX, OK, MO, KS, CO, NM, AZ, UT, ID, OR, WA, CA.

Whew.

Only 16 states left to discover or pass through on my way to somewhere else.

Windsor, CA 2014

There’s a whole big, beautiful continent waiting out there for those of us who dare to have both a writing life and a roaming life. Somewhere in between the corporate greed, political cronyism, the struggle to maintain our constitutional rights, environmental issues, human rights issues, etc., there are stories to be found in the lives of regular people. I think their stories are far more interesting and relevant than, say, the plethora of empty-headed narcissists parading around on those so-called reality shows (talk about needing to get a life). It’s their stories that bind us together as a nation, a community, and a people/species. And it’s those stories I might like to tell. They’re the ones worth reading, in my opinion…

(and I’m an expert on that).