When I Grow Up I Wanna Be...

... wait a minute.

Nobody said anything to me about growing up! I'm not signing up for this! Call my lawyer - his name is Peter Pan.

Seriously. Ask anybody who knows me. Ask my mother (especially my mother!). They will all tell you the same thing. Growing up is a feat I simply have not managed. Nor expect to. Not in this lifetime. No way no how.

It was a decision I made quite deliberately at a very young age. So, of course, I was destined from that very young age to be a writer!

Well, actually, it was never quite that cut-and-dried. (I mean, for a few years there, I read nothing but Walter Farley's Black Stallion books and therefore was convinced that I would wind up with a wildly successful career as a jockey. Never mind that I didn't own a horse or live on a farm.) But let's just say that my raging defiance in the face of actual grow-up-ing-ness meant that I was destined to make my vocational way in a field that would probably be strange, unconventional, and heavily based on the time-honored childish (and I mean that in the positive sense) tradition of Making Stuff Up.

That left me three choices, much to my parents' chagrin.

I would be an Actor, an Artist, or a Writer.

I have, at various and sundry times, been more than one and sometimes all three. All very romantic sounding, these choices, I know. But they are none of them for the faint-of-heart or thin-of-skin. I fact, for awhile there, I was starting to question whether or not I was just some kind of rejection-junkie or something. It also meant that I've pretty much always had a day job as a consequence. The whole 'starving artist' thing? Not so much a stretch of the truth if that's your only gig, and you're not Evangeline Lily.

Eventually, as time went on, the Artist thing sort of fell to the side of the road - I still love to paint and draw and, for awhile there, it was a toss-up as to whether I go to art school or theatre school (heh - in retrospect, I may have been misguided on that particular decision...) but I stopped entertaining capital 'A' Art as a career choice. I still wasn't going to grow up and get a real job, though, no-siree (of course - as I mentioned - all this time, I always had a real job of one kind or another. Call it 'denial', okay?).

Anyway, with the demise of the Artist, that left Actor. And Writer.

I'm still both. Although, as luck and Fate and the good graces of the universe would have it, after calling myself a professional actor for years, I now call myself a professional writer. And not just a writer, an Author. Which is really-and-for-true the place I've always wanted to be. Playing in that great big sand-box of "what if" that I so loved as a kid. The one that I'm never never ever gonna outgrow. Not if I have anything to say about it!