"Am I Too Late?" by Julianna Rowe

 

 Am I Too Late?  by Julianna Rowe

The internet has a funny way of making us think we're always late. I have found that when I finally have the courage to try something, suddenly there are three other people already doing it.

A few years ago I had an idea-invention called "Greenspan." A portable podie/poo spot for animals on fake washable grass for apartment dwellers and balcony use?  I didn't pursue it. Tomorrow it will be something else. Then again, years ago, I had more ideas that seemed crazy. Wallpaper on ceilings where I could start the business in my garage. Then it was handmade Victorian velvet keepsakes with tiny photographs. Then it was stories that touched subjects people weren't talking about yet such as underground sex-trafficking. I didn't have the courage to do any of them and then look what happened. (I did publish the sex traffiking novel, "The Horrors That Hide," Mind you, that book came out a year before the Epstein files hit the world)  ALL of those ideas showed up years later in one form or another.  

Did I miss my chance? Maybe. Or maybe the lesson wasn't that I was too late. Maybe the lesson was that ideas have their own timing. The truth is, there are thousands of mystery novels. Thousands of romance novels. Thousands of songs about love. Yet someone still writes one that touches us. Not because the idea is new, but because it's the heart behind it. That's what I've been reminding myself lately.

I don't need to be first, that wasn't the idea, financial stability was. I need to be honest.

Any book I write, any idea I complete, won't be someone else's because nobody else has spent months laughing, crying,  or toiling it to the finish line. That belongs to me. Life isn't asking me to outrun everyone else. Although  my brain does run on overdrive on its own. Maybe it's simply asking me to keep writing.

And if you're putting off something because you think someone else already did it...Do it anyway. The world has room for more than one voice, book, song, and or one more Portable, washable, doggie poddie pad! 

I'm finally beginning to believe that includes mine.