It takes solid perspective and a certain maturity to wait. Waiting for something good to happen, like getting an offer for a better job or a HarperCollins editorial review. Waiting for your children to grow up and become independent adults. Waiting to retire to start living. Waiting for the next phase of your life to begin. Truth be told, I’ve never been a patient person. To wait is to hope for life to be better one day. To wait is to wish for an improved future. One day…I’ll get that Mini Cooper I’ve always wanted…my novel will be published…thousands, no millions of people will buy and appreciate my book…those extra pounds will disappear…I’ll buy my luxury city condo and that isolated cave by the salty sea…I’ll make my living by writing.

Hope. It’s a waiting game. Some find hope easy to come by, while others like me get annoyed and impatient, bored and dissatisfied with the endless infinity of a disembodied future. But Ancient Glory takes a practical approach in my novel, PERSEPHONE IN HELL. Forty years after her coming of age, Glory reckons that both hope and impatience are misplaced emotions. Her years have gone by; her life is almost over. It’s time to get real.

“Perhaps I have a bit of a real queen in me after all. Because I decided that I wanted to live. And I’ve learned something, not from all my imaginings and escapes, my fractured histories. I’ve learned there is nothing to be done but accept the explanations. Block out the pain. Go on. Even a queen can only wait so long for good news from across a wide ocean. At some point, she’s got to move on.

And scars will lighten, they’ll pale unless you keep rubbing at them. Best to let them be, let them fade away in their own good time, in their own difficult and savage, cruelly dissonant way. Wait long enough, they’ll fade – it’s the law of nature.”

Wait long enough…no, that’s Ancient Glory. That’s not impatient, impulsive, impetuous me.