So, we’re coming up on the end of our third week here in Ceret. After Saturday, we have one more week here, and then Debbie and I have three days in Lyon before heading back to the states.

Already, we are talking sadly about how fast the time has gone. How hard it will be to leave. How much fun we’ve had. How much writing we’ve gotten done. How wonderful it has all been.

And I am sad that this writing sojourn will be over (I refuse to use the word soon in that sentence). But I am also so, so grateful to have this opportunity. I tell myself how lucky I am. But then I stop and think about it. Years ago, when I was living in Sun Valley, Idaho and leaving to return to college after a semester off a friend told me, “Remember, you make you own luck.”

I think I believe that. Yes, we are lucky to be here, but it also takes work. It takes work to find the housing, figure out the travel connections, make the arrangements and so on. But more than that, it takes believing that you can do it. As Debbie, my business partner in Let’s Go Write, good friend, and mastermind of this trip says, “You just have to decide that you’re going to do it.”

(Sort of like writing, right? Would any sane person embark on the process of writing a novel? Or a memoir? Or even a short story or essay? Well, no. But then I’ve always said that writers are the best, most interesting people around so if we are all crazy I guess that is okay.)

This is starting to sound preachy, and I don’t mean it to. My intent is to open your mind, and expand your horizons and make you start believing you can do it, too. I’ve been coming to France once a year (this year it will be twice) now for six years. The first time I came, I flew over by myself and made my way to the Air BnB room in an apartment by myself and I was scared to death. I’d gotten used to traveling alone all over the states, but I’d not traveled internationally by myself ever. For that matter, I hadn’t traveled internationally for 30 years.

I managed just fine, of course, because one does. But hailing a taxi was scary (my landlord did it for me), trying to figure out what track the train left from was terrifying (luckily, Debbie met me there), and who knew you had to haul all your suitcases up a tiny staircase once you got on the train? Plus, the French speak very fast and half the time I was left staring at someone trying to talk to me with my mouth open in the universal expression of, “huh?”

But I also remember the feeling of exhilaration that overcame me that first year. How excited I was that I could actually manage to do this. And that feeling has not lessened in all my journeys here since. I still sometimes find myself in a car on a narrow French road lined with plane trees, thinking, I’m in France, I’m in France, I’m in France.

So if I can do it, you can do it (and if you want to come for a writing workshop, consider sojourning with us in September in Collioure.)

It is work, luck, and writing that got me here.  Besides my family, writing has gotten me all the best things in my life–travel, adventure, friends, fun, excitement. As I sit here gazing out from behind my computer to the French sunshine, all I can think is how lucky I am, how grateful I am, but most of all, how good it is to be a writer.

Where has your writing taken you? Leave a comment, or join the Facebook group and we can chat there.