Your comments, support, and enthusiasm for my posting, I Ditched My Plum Job to Write a Novel, were inspiring and motivating. What great suggestions for moving my reinvention in Costa Rica forward! I especially loved all the ideas for generating income from my writing in this new social media world. I’ve been busy putting those ideas to work and I’ll talk about them in a moment, but first I want to address your question about how exactly does a woman chuck her job, move to Costa Rica to write a novel, and survive?
We all know how to chuck our jobs. We do it the same way we end painful marriages or relationships. We wake up one day and say: “I’m not doing this anymore.”
But then comes the hard part: building a new life — and the responsibility falls on you alone. You close your eyes, and lingering under the surface of your fears, are your dreams. You know them well. They are all those desires you have pushed back for years. Some are so strong you cannot even verbalize them.
The idea of moving to Costa Rica to write a novel first bubbled to the surface eight years ago when I was living alone in Atlanta. I had moved there to recover from a painful break-up and to start a new job, as the relationship had been also financially draining. The job as event producer ended a year later when the company folded. I quickly took another position with a dot.com company, but found it even more unfulfilling. Bored and frustrated, I wondered, is this really what I’m supposed to be doing with my life? Around this time, I took a quick get-away trip to Belize with a girlfriend. I remember driving through the villages on dirt roads towards our jungle retreat and thinking how great it would be to escape with my dog and hole-up in one of the little blue shacks along the water, and write. The image stuck.
