Why Wildwinds is a Real Word*

On yaHighway, we hold a weekly Road Trip Wednesday, where we ask a writing/reading question and all the contributors answer on our personal blogs. If you want to participate on your own blog, just post the link in the comments section of YAH and we’ll check it out! This week’s question requires some explanation…

“The winds in Washokey make people go crazy.”

That’s the first line of Kirsten Hubbard’s debut novel, Like Mandarin, coming this spring. Want to read it? (I can tell you, having read it, that oh yes you do.) Post about a time you did something crazy, then check out the entry form on yaHighway for a chance to win a Like Mandarin ARC!

This immediately got me searching my memory for one brief, crazy moment. Was there some time that I perhaps went skydiving, or maybe won a ribbon for eating 78.5 hot dogs that I’d forgotten about? (Heck no, I hate hot dogs.)

And then I remembered a truly crazy moment, probably the craziest of my entire life – it just didn’t seem so crazy at the time. It was the moment in November of 2006 that my husband and I were out eating dinner in McKinney, Texas and he said “Let’s move to Brazil” and I said “Okay.”

Sometimes you gotta jump right into the crazy.

We agreed that night to not even discuss it again until January. We wanted to see if we were serious, if it wasn’t just a giddy feeling that would pass. And on January 1st of 2007, we decided to do it.

The next six months included selling a house we loved, selling two cars, giving about three truckloads of stuff to Goodwill, moving in with my wonderful mother-in-law, resigning from great jobs we adored, saying good-bye to a whole, whole lot of people, buying two one-way plane tickets to Salvador and setting off in July with two tourist visas, a bunch of drums and no jobs lined up.

Like most crazy things, I don’t regret doing it for a second.

What about you – what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done, and would you do it again?

*Why? Because Kirsten made it so.