Prologue
Everybody has a different definition of ‘writer’.
A writer can be a journalist, a poet, a playwright , a little girl writing her thoughts in her diary, a boss typing an urgent email, a high school boy finishing an essay at 2 am, a mother doing her grocery list, a thug vandalizing a wall with his spray-paint can, and the list goes on and on.
Tobin Heath is not one of them.
Tobin Heath is a novelist.
Now, once again everybody has an image of what a novelist looks like.
If I ask you to describe a novelist you’ll probably think of a tall man wearing an immaculate suit and glasses on his nose. Just type ‘writer’ in Google Image and you’ll see that it’s the common stereotype. And if you imagine a novelist writing his book you probably think of him sitting at his large wooden desk typing swiftly on his keyboard with a hot cup of coffee always in the vicinity.
Tobin Heath… well let’s just say she does not fit in that category.
Her closet mostly contains large hoodies, loose tank tops and t-shirts, soccer or cargo shorts and ripped jeans. Oh, and snapbacks. Lots of them.
She does have a wooden desk though. However there are no computer or cup of coffee on it; just a pile of things, each as random as the others.
She also owns a computer even though it is not on her desk. Where is it? She wouldn’t know the answer for she does not use it.
Indeed, she is one of the rare writers who still work with pens and paper. She writes everywhere; lying on the sand with the sound of the waves inspiring her, on the backseat of a taxi while the driver yells at other cars, with a spoonful of rice in her mouth sitting on her kitchen floor, in the middle of a park where she started a run but had lost her momentum as a sudden idea emerged in her mind.
There is also one thing that people think about writers. You often hear that they can be loners, confined in their own bubble, in their own thoughts, that they see the world differently and are not understood.
For once, Tobin Heath fits this category.
She isn’t solitary in the ‘suffering from it’ kind of way. She just is. And that’s okay with her.
She knows that most people who are 24 years old like her have a lot of friends but that’s not who she is.
Although she has friends. She can count them on her fingers: Ashlyn, Kelley, Amy, Lauren.
And she has family too.
Those people mean the world to her and she is more than happy to see them from time to time.
But she spends most of her time by herself in her own thoughts; exploring new places, juggling the ball around, longboarding, surfing, reading books, re-reading books, reading her Bible.
She thanks God every day for giving her this life.
She has people who truly care about her, she has people who read her work and actually like it, she has to wake up and do what she loves to do the most and the whole wide world calls her “one hell of a novelist” for that.
She also gets to make a good living out of her passion. Not that money is her priority but with it she got to buy her dreamed house. What’s more beautiful than to wake up to the sight of the ocean? The first thing she feels under her feet when she opens her door is the warm sand of San Francisco.
Tobin Heath is not the kind of novelist you could think of.
Tobin Heath loves her life.
Tobin Heath wouldn’t change a thing.
Tobin Heath wouldn’t change a thing but she doesn’t get to decide.
And things change.