I am slowing down.
One of the main reasons we worked so hard to obtain early
financial independence (click here for info about my book that teaches you how to do that) was so that we would be able to stop stressing ourselves
out, trying to make money. So we wouldn’t have to work so hard.
One of the reasons we moved to southeast Oklahoma was to be
surrounded by beauty. And not having to work for other people, we should have a
lot of time to enjoy that beauty.
But I have to be honest: when you grow up poor, then
struggle on a teacher’s salary for over a decade, then “play at being poor” (a
quote from the British classic, The Railway Children) for several
years in order to have more money to stow away in financial investments, it’s
hard to get out of the work-for-money-or-die mentality. And so I’ve been
stressing myself out the past couple of weeks writing ten pages a day in my latest
novel – this after I had declared to J that if writing became not fun, I
wouldn’t do it.
As a result, I’ve been ignoring B, getting irritable from
having to fight to find time to write that much every day (gardening is taking
a lot of time these days), ditto from having to find PEACE AND QUIET during my
writing times, and getting sick of the story. Not much fun in all that, is
there?
So I’ve decided to slow down. Four pages a day will still
allow me to publish four novels a year – if I decide to write every day and
never take a vacation. But until B becomes more independent, I may keep my
number of novels down to one or two a year. We shall see.
In the meantime, I am already happier about my decision, and
hope to see J and B grow happier as an outgrowth of my chilling out.
I am now almost half done with my latest novel, so you can
anticipate its publication between mid-October to early November (2014).
In the meantime, allow me to recommend a couple of fiction
books I have enjoyed recently: How Sweet The Sound by Amy Sorrells
(intense at times – one of the plot lines is a woman’s recovery from rape), and
Courting Cate by Leslie Gould (an Amish romance).
Happy reading!
