This week, for the first time in many months, I am feeling happy and energized. Sure, all the news I shared last week is part of that. I mean, having two books coming out and lots of other projects in the works would make anyone feel good. But it’s more than that.
For the first time in a long time I am feeling hopeful. Really hopeful, not that faint scared-to-say-it hope that came with the vaccines.
Over the last two years, even before I launched this site, I have been living under a cloud. The pandemic, certainly had something to do with it, but it was more than that. It was a cloud of free-floating anxiety that colored nearly everything I thought and said. I was trying to work through the retirement changes, and got a ton of other stuff piled on top. At times I felt like I was drowning.
When Steve landed in the hospital at Thanksgiving it left me near the breaking point. My work here suffered, other projects were delayed or abandoned, and the resulting bills left me reeling. I ran what felt like dozens of financial forecasts and was convinced I had to keep working through the end of the year to pull off anything that might keep us out of serious tax trouble (we could draw the money from investments and retirement, but the tax hit would be considerable).
A position came up within the hotel, one which I was thoroughly qualified for, and I applied. It was a stopgap, but one I could live with. Well, a few days ago I had an email from HR telling me they had decided not to fill the position after all. And you know what? I was flooded with relief!
At the same time I heard from Steve’s health insurance company and they are reclassifying the bills they had previously rejected, so at least some of the financial strain has been relieved.
(Here’s a tip: If your insurer rejects a claim, call them and politely ask them to reconsider. It doesn’t hurt to ask, in the course of the conversation, “I will still retain my right to appeal, correct?” I am beginning to think they just refuse anything they think they can, and then relent if you push back.)
I’d also managed to settle at least one rejected claim by calling the provider directly. They immediately settled for 50%, and I think they might have gone lower if I’d pushed harder. So there’s another tip: always ask for a discount, or a negotiated settlement.
But the thing that really pushed me? The part that elevated my mental health the most?
I started rebuilding our publishing company.
Steve and I have had our own publishing company for many years. We first tried indie publishing about 15 years ago with Amazon’s CreateSpace division. After his heart attack everything got set aside. We intended to ramp back up when I retired, but I went back to work and it never really happened.
The opportunities I talked about last week were a kick-in-the-pants reminder of that promise to ourselves, and we resolved to do better.
That has proven a little harder than we thought. One piece of necessary publishing software only runs on Macintosh. No sweat, we bought a little MacBook a few years back just for that purpose. Which bricked itself within a week of getting the software updates installed.
We were faced with a serious problem. The Mac did not appear to be repairable, and we either had to replace it or face some convoluted work-arounds. Replacing it, while still facing down the pile of medical bills (this was before the insurance relief) was daunting, and we had to give it some serious thought and discussion. In the end we decided that replacement was a necessity, and we went shopping.
Long story short (too late!) we bought a replacement that will work for us, a MacMini, that cost substantially less than the laptop we expected to get, and it’s working like a charm – but I am facing a steep learning curve.
Somehow, bringing that computer home made a huge difference in my outlook. Maybe it was the fact that I dinged my credit card a bit and felt like I needed to justify the expense. Maybe it felt like a concrete symbol of my coming back to my love of telling stories and sharing them with the world. Maybe it was the fact that I was doing something positive and moving forward, even in the face of everything that has happened in the last two years.
Over the last two weeks I have reestablished a lot of the publisher’s connections to distributors and sales sites. I’ve put together the two books that will be coming out – learning new tricks in the publishing software we use. Just today I took a story Steve has upcoming in the Uncollected Anthology: Pirates (check them out, they have some great writers!) and in a couple hours I had it ready to go on all the usual sites. (This volume launches April 1. Don’t worry, I will remind you. After all, he’s one of my favorite writers!)
I don’t know if this will last, but I feel like it is a good sign. Doing what I love has lifted my spirits. Even the problems, like finding old passwords or trying to figure out how to use sites and software I haven’t touched in way too long, haven’t killed my momentum.
The day job is, well, a day job. I’m getting closer to the end every day, just as my calendar is filling up with deadlines for things I am enjoying. Seems like a nice trade-off.
I’ve even started going through the books and stories that I set aside when things stopped me. Which leads to the last piece of good news – I sold a short story this week!
I am feeling much better – and my wish for you is that you can feel the hope!