I’m so inspired by Wally Funk today

This morning, I was glued to my screen watching as Blue Origin launched their first sub-orbital mission to space carrying Amazon and Blue Origin founder, Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, paying passenger 18 year-old Oliver Daemen from The Netherlands, and 82 year-old Wally Funk, one of the original Mercury 13 women who trained to be astronauts in the sixties but were never given the chance to fly. As a writer, I’m not a huge supporter of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but his decision to invite Wally Funk to be part of this voyage to space was inspired and left me quite emotional about it all. For nearly her entire life, Wally Funk has dedicated herself to flying and reaching space. Barriers were thrown in her path every step of the way, yet today she was weightless in space, finally. Her journey is not unlike that of Landon Percival in my third novel, Up and Down. I’ve had a lot of emails in the last week or so about the symmetry of Wally Funk’s odyssey and Landon’s in the novel. Life imitating art, perhaps.