Imagination sets in
My graphic designer, Tolu, is working feverishly to finish the book. I know he is doing a great job, which takes time, but by now my patience is wearing thin. I want to publish it and share it with everybody as soon as possible. It was supposed to be ready by the end of February, then it was supposed to be done by mid-March. But it’s a huge job.
My graphic designer, Tolu Shufole, is based in London
Nevertheless, this is what it takes to produce a professional-quality book. You can’t skip steps, and you can’t rush the other members of the team (the editor, the proofreader, or the graphic designer) any more than any of them could have rushed me when I was trying to write it. It takes as long as it takes. And you just have to wait.
I got a notice that a local library in my hometown has invited me to participate in a local author book fair in mid-April. My first book fair! So the book absolutely has to be done by then. It’s just a local author thing in a county library, but I’m already getting excited.
Hamilton East Public Library | Ideas Live Here | Fishers, IN (hepl.lib.in.us)
My imagination tends to run wild. It reminds me of this song by CCR.
“Just got home from Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy!/Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch
Imagination sets in, pretty soon I'm singin'/Doo, doo, doo, lookin' out my back door”
John Fogerty’s voice made Creedence Clearwater a knock-out band
Some of us are endowed with active imaginations, and as for me, mine is wildly overactive. Always has been. As a child in a Catholic grade school, I had to learn early to keep my imagination under wraps. The nuns were not big fans of imagination. Hiding my imagination became a lifetime habit in school and at work. Teachers and employers mostly want you to follow the rules, complete the assignments, and accomplish your goals.
Carl, are you daydreaming again?
Then, I wrote a book, and finally, my imagination got to go wild. It was free to roam. Imagination is really the key to writing, even if you’re writing your own memoir. It’s nonfiction, but these days, even nonfiction writers are supposed to utilize the literary devices of fiction to spice up their prose. I had to have a plot. But how do you get a plot for your life? Are you supposed to be born clutching a scroll on which your life plot is written?
Imagination is also what set in motion the crazy idea of doing a national book tour. I just sat there one day and dreamed up the idea. Once it was in my head, I couldn’t shake it. It took hold of me. My brain was on fire. I decided that I would visit independent bookstores in all 48 contiguous states in a campervan. I would give myself six months, which translated to eight states per month, which only allowed me 3.5 days per state.
That meant I would be on the road almost every day, spending a day at most in a large city, and a day at a national park (if there was one), because, how could I pass up visiting the amazing national parks in the US, which I had never seen? (I had spent most of my adult life in Africa, so I never really visited the US much). And a day for driving from place to place, either going across states east-west or north-south as in Florida.
At Joshua Tree National Park in CA
Most people would think it was crazy for a man my age to go on a national book tour in a campervan, and they are probably right. It was also crazy to let go of my lease and put all my stuff in storage. But why should I pay rent and utilities for six months when I wouldn’t even be there? So to me, it would have been crazy NOT to give up the lease. This led to a dilemma: did not having a home mean that I was homeless? The legal answer is, yes.
Legally, a person who does not have a fixed abode is homeless. But the word homeless is loaded. We tend to think of a person living on the streets, who does not know where he or she will sleep from one day to the next. The person carries all their belongings in a shopping cart. Sometimes they ask people for money. They may not have anywhere to shower, and they may wear layers of shabby clothes even on warm days. It looks odd.
Homeless person using shopping cart
As I think about myself, I have a home, my campervan. I know exactly where I will sleep at night. I can lock the doors, so it is reasonably safe. (There was that one scary night when the meth-heads attacked us, but we survived.)
I chose to snowbird, visiting the northern states during the summer to avoid extreme heat, and the South in the winter, to avoid extremely cold weather. Therefore, I do not have to wear many layers of clothes to stay warm.
The more I thought about it, and let my imagination run wild, the more it seemed to me that I was home-free, not homeless. It did not take long to realize that I loved traveling around the country for the first time, and that I did not miss going home to the same house every night, baby-sitting my possessions, in effect. It seemed to me that the home owned me, rather than the other way around. Having a home hindered me from traveling.
NOT having a home made me feel that I could go anywhere I wanted and search for a new home. Eventually, my imagination came up with a new term: I was not searching for a home, but a home base. As a writer, I do not need to live in one place all the time. In fact, visiting other places provides me with material for a book. And I already have a title for a book about leaving home and doing a national book tour in a campervan with my dog: Home Free.
(Home Free will be the second book by aspiring author Carl William Henn. Due out as early as late 2023 or early 2024.)
