Kim Kelly

It’s never too late. There will never be enough hours in the day. Life will always get in the way. So now is as good a time as any? Isn’t it? To do it. To push your little boat out from your safe harbour and chase that dream.

I’m almost forty-six years old and it took me about thirty-five of those years to summon the courage. I’m so glad I did. Grateful every day. In a few short weeks when my third novel, The Blue Mile, hits the bookstores, a total of 400,000 of my words will be in the world. I’m finessing the next novel right now and then I’ll have half a million words under my belt. This blows me away.

It’s hard work, most of the time. Life certainly does get in the way. For starters, a year ago, I almost lost my husband Dean to acute renal failure. That really would have put the kybosh on romance for a while had the worst happened. But it didn’t. It’s been a wobbly old road back into normality, whatever that is, with crazy rounds of doctors’ visits and tests for me to see if I can sling him one of my kidneys – and I’m pleased to say I can, and we’ll be bonding in this extreme way in the next few months, all being well. In and around all that, though, I’ve been missing my ‘grown-up’ kids terribly, searching for a house to call home, together with worrying about money and how to fit writing around proper-job work and all the shit that goes along with being alive day after day.

Never frigging stops, does it?!

But day after day I have recommitted to writing, too. My push back at the shoves I’ve received. Sometimes it’s an escape. Sometimes it’s a blessed relief. And it’s always a challenge, to myself: just bloody do it.

You only get one life. Mine is half over, I reckon. I have to do it. And whatever dream you cherish and long to fulfill, I hope you do it too.

Yes, if you’re wondering, that’s Dean there in the photo above, a few weeks out of ICU, down on the Macquarie at Ophir being in his element, being alive. Being a bloody legend.

So do it. Start now. You know you want to…