Real Help for Post-Menopause Blues and Blahs, Part One.

The other day, I did an online search for the term, “post menopause feel like I don’t have any purpose.” Or something like that. The results that came back were nothing short of irrelevant and abysmal. They were all pep talks about how great life after fifty is, because women supposedly suddenly have so much more freedom than they’ve ever had. They can jump into hobbies they’ve been yearning to try, travel the world, get involved with community events, re-ignite the romance in their marriage or, if they don’t currently have a spouse, start dating again.

I wonder what planet the writers of those articles are living on. Besides the fact that a lot of Gen-X women didn’t begin having children until their thirties, so that by the time they hit menopause, they still have teenagers in the house, many women in their fifties have to go to work. If they have a nest egg, even in conjunction with that of a husband, it’s nowhere near big enough to allow them to retire. No freedom there.

Second, many, many post-menopausal women are suffering physically due to The Change of Life. If nothing else, they’re tired all the time, and that’s even if they’re one of the few, the proud, the merrily able to get eight hours of sleep every night. When you’re fatigued, you do not feel as if you have any freedom. In a very real sense, you are enslaved to the tiredness. You can barely drag yourself out of bed just to perform your daily duties. You couldn’t care less about starting a new hobby, often don’t feel like working on any hobbies that you’ve held dear for a long time, and the mere idea of having to drive to the airport, fly to somewhere new, and navigate your way around an unfamiliar place exhausts you.

Constantly being tired leads to depression. Period, end of story. There’s no “can” about it. If you are chronically fatigued, you will get depressed.

(Before you continue reading, please read the disclaimer at the end of this article and agree to it. The disclaimer pertains to all four articles in this series. Thank you.)

A lot of neurotypical women suddenly develop sensory issues and short-term memory problems, and those of us who are neurodivergent find our sensitivities growing to uncomfortably intense levels and our short-term memory failing us more than ever. Digestive issues with no apparent organic root cause turn eating favorite healthy homemade meals into a literal pain, leading you to near panic when someone suggests they take you out to eat.

For some women, HRT resolves all of those problems. For many, it does not, and for many more, HRT is not an option either for financial reasons or because they know about the potential side effects and want to avoid them. You can only take medically prescribed HRT for so long, and as soon as you’re off of it, the unwanted symptoms return.

If you resonate with anything I’ve written above, if you’re a post-menopausal woman who is living with a continual low level of depression because you’re always tired, and/or health anxiety because of the strange and uncomfortable symptoms that keep cropping up out of nowhere, if you feel like you couldn’t find a purpose in life if someone paid you a billion dollars to do so, keep reading. I don’t promise to solve all of your problems in one fell swoop, but as a neurodivergent post-menopausal woman in her mid-fifties who went through perimenopause hell and continues to struggle with feeling content about life in general, and her body in specific, I think I can give you more realistic help for navigating this period of your life than what I’ve been able to find online.

This article is the first in a four-art series of tips on how to feel better after menopause (they’ll work for the perimenopause years, as well), so be sure to click on the link to each subsequent article at the end of each post.

The most important tip of all…

I will begin and end the first article in the series with the most critical tip I have for starting your journey toward feeling more balanced and healthy after menopause, and that is this: Get your hormone levels tested.

Likely as not, the root cause for most of your physiological problems is being low in one or more of the major reproductive hormones, or having an imbalance of them. Ideally, a hormone test would include estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. Including a vitamin D serum test might be helpful, as well, because low levels of vitamin D not only equate to a weakened immune system (which post-menopausal women have by default), but also to greater fatigue.

Don’t be like me and assume that you know where you’re imbalances lie and try to fix them with over-the-counter remedies. For a long time, I was convinced that I was low in both progesterone and estrogen, and was therefore shocked when I finally broke down and had a test done and discovered that my estrogen levels were actually normal.

The health testing website EverlyWell will send you a saliva sample test that you send back to them, and you pay only for the testing, not for clinic overhead. However, their menopause test does not include testosterone.

Once you have your results, you can make better decisions about how to go about remedying your hormone imbalances. Progesterone cream is easily available online and at health food stores, and I tell you from personal experience that it works. If you’re low in estrogen, eating more plant foods and/or using estradiol cream can help. Of course, if you have a gynecologist who does the testing and you want to try HRT, your doctor will prescribe the balance that you need.

Increasing the levels of reproductive hormones in your body usually goes a long way to alleviating symptoms. But whether you take a pill, use a cream, or drastically change your diet, it will likely be weeks before you notice the hot flashes dissipating, the mood swings calming, the random aches and pains evaporating. And even when the hormone therapy fully kicks in, it won’t keep your body from aging. There will still be obvious signs that you’re not thirty anymore, signs that will gradually grow in both number and intensity.

Thus, the remaining tips in upcoming posts are ones to help you slow down the aging process as much as you can, as well as to help you navigate life so that you can feel contented and fulfilled despite any persistent and lingering menopausal symptoms.

Don’t miss them. Click here to read the second article in this series.

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DISCLAIMER: This series of articles is NOT intended to offer medical advice or treatment. Rather, I want to share what I've learned, and am learning, from my own experience. I don't guarantee that any of the tips in any of the articles will impact your life in a positive way, and you and you alone are responsible for what you do with the information found within the articles.

A Visitation, AKA, Necessary Encouragement for Anyone Who Is Struggling.

I’ve been going through some stuff lately. The worst has been the annual depression produced by a combination of the constant drop in barometric pressure, and the gloominess of experiencing several consecutive days of gray skies. Spring may be some people’s favorite season, but where I live, and for my Highly Sensitive Autistic self, the season is a struggle to get through.

Then there are a couple of chronic health challenges I’ve been dealing with (nothing life-threatening, just annoying at best and disconcerting at worst), one of which I recently exacerbated by making a wrong and non-reversible treatment decision about it.

[UPDATE August 2024 - That "wrong" decision, a tooth extraction to eliminate an otherwise untreatable gum infection, turned out to be the perfect decision.]

Anyone over the age of thirty, especially those over the age of forty who are beginning to see and feel the effects of aging, can relate. No one has the perfect Instagram life, and sometimes, perhaps much more often than we care to admit to anyone beyond our close circle, life is downright depressing. Instead of a light at the end of a tunnel, all we can see is a black hole. Every cloud we look at is lined with tar, any half-full glass we come across, we accidentally knock to the floor and break.

But no matter what you’re going through, there is hope. Last night, God reminded me of that in a dream, and if you’re starting to navigate away from this article because I said the “G” word, then I guess you haven’t hit rock bottom yet. You still have enough strength left in you to exercise your pride, enough strength to cling to an impossible belief, the belief that everything came from nothing. 

The words that follow are not meant to convince the illogical, deceived unbeliever, but believers who wrestle against thoughts that God must not love them, as well as unbelievers who want to believe, but can’t understand how a loving God can allow bad things to happen. If you don’t belong to one of those two groups, goodbye.

For the rest of you…

Last night, for the first time in all of my fifty-four years (that I am aware), Yeshua showed up in one of my dreams. The setting was some sort of dystopia, in which innocent citizens were being forced to help their evil conquerors to fight their war. I knew no specific details in the dream, but everyone around me was afraid, and there was a sense that we, the innocents, were eventually going to be killed, one way or the other.

Then, Yeshua walked onto the scene, from behind a large stone wall, I think, or perhaps He appeared from behind a group of people. I and two others, the only two other believers there besides me, recognized Him instantly. At the same time, we understood that we were not to reveal Who He was. We also understood that the enemy would not have the final say. We knew Yeshua had come to help us fight against them.

He looked nothing like any of the actors I’ve ever seen portray Yeshua, whether in movies or in music videos. He was not handsome. He was on the short side for a man, maybe a couple of inches taller than my five-foot-three height, had a fit physique, dark tan skin, and wavy, dark brown hair that fell to His shoulders. He had brown eyes, a large nose, and a round chin.

No, unlike the men I’ve seen throughout the years portraying Jesus, the Man of my dreams would never be invited to model for the cover of a romance novel.

Nevertheless, He was beautiful in a way I can’t explain. Love glimmered in His eyes, and He had a smile that communicated gentleness, kindness, compassion, and trustworthiness.

Though He came out to mingle with the innocents, He would occasionally duck away when certain of the enemy’s leaders appeared. They knew Him, and He did not want to alert them of His presence.

At one point, He stood right next to me, and I leaned against Him, both needing to feel His reality and trying to express my gratitude for His being there. 

Sometimes, in my vivid dreams people speak coherent words. Other times, the communication is telepathic, and it was so in this dream. Of course, in this case you might say that I was praying silently, and that the Holy Spirit gave me Yeshua’s answer as He thought it.

Anyway, of all the things I might have asked Him given our dire situation, I decided, for some crazy reason, to ask Him about gardening.

Or, maybe not so crazy. In real life, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with gardening. I enjoy working outside, love nurturing plants and watching them grow. But gardening is a great challenge where we live.

First of all, springs and summers are so humid that many of the native plants, including trees, develop fungal disease. Most garden crops don’t have a chance at thriving for the entire season.

Second, the soil here is mostly broken-down sandstone. In order to grow anything, you either have to spend years amending the native soil, or build raised beds and fill them with potting mix (I’ve done a combination of both).

Finally, I have to water the garden by hand (too long of an explanation as to why), and when it’s ninety degrees with seventy percent humidity by ten o’clock in the morning, the chore takes all the romance out of growing your own food. Not to mention all of the energy from the rest of your day.

My point: for me, growing vegetables is a good representative of all the ongoing struggles in my life.

I don’t remember what I specifically asked about gardening. I think it was along the lines of, how can I produce more with less work? Or maybe it was, should I even bother trying to continue growing vegetables? Whatever the question, it was filled with frustration. A sense of, is all that work even worth it?

Neither do I remember His specific answer. It was, as is God’s voice in one’s waking hours, more of an impression, and the impression was this: enjoy the process. Flow with the process. Learn from the process.

In other words, relax and trust. The very two life issues I struggle with the most.

BUT. I can do both, if I would just remember that Yeshua is always with me.

As with most dreams, not long after I woke up, the dream’s images and details began to fade. I didn’t wake up with a profound sense of peace, or excitement over having been in my Savior’s presence. But what I did wake up with, the one impression that has not faded, is that no matter how I feel, no matter what I’m going through – especially when I feel trapped by all the negative aspects of life, like they and they alone are what dictate my path – Yeshua is right beside me.

There was another impression, too, one which religious people will fail to accept.

My sins are forgiven, so I can stop feeling guilty over every wrong thought, word, and action that emanates from my being. I can stop beating myself up over not being perfect. Yeshua is beside me, because He wants to be in my company. No matter what.

While this is far from the first time in my life that I’ve heard something similar, it was the first time that I felt it coming straight from the Throne Room itself. How many times have I told my husband, “If only Yeshua would just come down and tell me XYZ…”

He finally did.

You might think, “It was just a dream.” Well, God speaks through dreams. This happens to be the first –and probably only – time that He has spoken to me so directly, without making me wade through a sea of symbols to interpret.

This dream counts as a visitation from my Lord.

If you’re a believer and have been struggling with God’s love, that word is for you. Yeshua said that in this life we will have tribulations – including gardens that won’t work, including messes of our own making – but to be of good cheer, for He has overcome them.

If you are not yet a believer, because you see the evil around you and wonder how a loving God can allow it, what you need to know is that God has not allowed any of it.

We have.

We, the human beings whom He commanded to have dominion over the earth, have taken that dominion and abused it with our greed, selfishness, lust, fear, and pride.

God will one day set all things right. The question is, while you walk through all the not-right things, do you want to continue alone, or do you want a friend – a friend who has the power to heal, to grant wisdom, to protect, to comfort, to guide, to give strength – to walk with you?

Writer’s Demand Avoidance; Or, Run Your Own Race

I recently discovered yet another psychiatric disorder. I call it “Writer’s Demand Avoidance,” the primary symptom of which is being unable to compose the usual type of writing which one is accustomed to, for a period of at least fourteen consecutive days. Upon trying to force oneself to work on a piece of writing, anger, anxiety, and writer’s block ensue, leading to greater frustration and feelings of Author Inadequacy.

The primary cause of this distressful disorder?

Deciding on a minimum daily word count, which minimum exceeds the prior minimum by at least 800 words and leads to resentment toward other daily tasks and hobbies because the increase word count also means decreased time available for non-writing activities.

I’m being facetious, and I know that deciding to stick to writing 3200 words per day this past mid-winter wasn’t the real reason for my novel writing shutdown for the past two months, but it didn’t help.

In the meantime, I worked on a self-help book. But before I started it, and while I was in between chapters of that book, whenever I tried to restart the fourth novel in my latest Christmas romance series, it just.

Wouldn’t.

Go.

Anywhere.

I had a similar trouble with the third book in the series, though I didn’t have in my head at the time to write more a day than my usual 2,000 words. So I was determined to write this final novel. If I could break through the demand avoidance with that one, I could do the same with this one.

I finished the self-help book, got a skeletal outline going for the romance novel… and threw the 3200 words per day idea out the window.

I’ve been steadily writing 2,000 words, and only 2,000 words, every day, even when I’ve felt like I could write more, for the over a week now. For the first time in a long time, writing fiction is fun. I’m not pressuring myself with a deadline. And, I have a lot of free time for chores, hobbies, and enjoying the outdoors.

I’m also finding that limiting my daily word count helps to keep the story momentum going. I don’t run out of steam.

Long story short? I believe pressuring myself with a high daily word count was causing novel writing burnout even though I was spacing the composition of said novels a good deal apart, as I’d promised I would do in this article. Why did I do it in the first place?, you might ask.

Because of having heard, over the past several years, other self-published fiction authors talk about how they whip out five thousand and more words per day. Without the help of AI, I might add.

I also might add that these authors usually don’t have any children, often are single, are younger than forty-five years old, and – here’s the clincher – if they don’t write that next book, they’ll have trouble paying the light bill.

I have no need to try to write a book a month. Or a book every two months. I write because the process fills a place in my soul, and makes me feel like I’m contributing something good to the world.

As long, that is, as I’m writing on my own terms, and not somebody else’s.

As I was reminded in an e-mail I received from Malory Ford, another Christian romance author, I need to run my own race, not somebody else’s.

Should I Purchase Property On Eagle’s Nest Ranch?

“Should I buy property on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma?”

If you’re asking this question, you’re one of its few intelligent prospective land buyers. As someone who has been living in the area for over ten years, I have some thoughts for you that I hope will help you make your decision.

Whitetail Properties aren’t the conservationists they claim to be.

Eagle’s Nest Ranch is being developed and sold by the rural Real Estate company called Whitetail Properties. On their website, they claim to be conservationists. However, by the time they finish preparing their three housing developments, they will have clear-cut several hundred acres of forest from what used to be a beautiful, pristine mountainside. They have destroyed the homes of countless birds and the habitat of deer and other animal species. 

If you purchase a tract on one of their “ranches,” there will be few to no trees on your property, or separating your property from the others. The Powers That Be at Whitetail Properties are, in effect, attempting to build suburban subdivisions in the middle of a forest.

Cutting to the chase, Whitetail Properties is run by people of dubitable moral character who care much more about the money they can suck out of people than about nature and conservation. When my husband and I bought our property in 2011, we had to sign a contract agreeing, among other things, that we would not cut down more than twenty percent of the trees on our property. 

Given that the developer had divided the area into tracts that were no smaller than five acres, and that the people purchasing the properties wanted to live in the woods – which is as it should be for anyone buying property inside of a forest – most of the forest in our mountain development remains intact, despite the fact that well over half of the owners have built houses, even gardens, here. The developer who sold us the property where we live has more conservationism in his pinky finger than the entirety of the staff on Whitetail Properties, or the managers of Eagle’s Nest Ranch.

The Owner/Managers of Eagle's Nest Ranch is inconsiderate of their neighbors.

If you go to the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website, one of their bragging points is the roads they have built through the mountains (again, a lot of loss of forest and wildlife). The material to build those roads did not come out of thin air. They had to get it from somewhere.

You’d like to think that they went to a pre-existing quarry and bought gravel. You’d think wrong. What they did was to destroy over five acres of forest in order to harvest the shale underneath.

But not just any five acres. The forest they eliminated, the land which they turned into a moonscape, is in the direct view of the two non-Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties which butt up against ENR. The quarry is ugly, and in the future should the current owners of those properties try to sell, the quarry will make it more difficult and possibly lower the land value.

Oh, and did I tell you that they decided it would be clever to burn the trees they were killing right next to the lower non-ENR property, and that they ended up burning to death several trees on that neighboring property? They never offered compensation to the owners of that property to cover the loss. The owners would likely have to file a lawsuit to get any.

There is also concern among the low-income residents of Clayton, the town nearest Eagle’s Nest Ranch, that their property taxes will increase considerably thanks to Whitetail Properties. If that happens, many people might be displaced.

They charge exorbitant prices.

Whitetail Properties is known for overpricing properties to excess. One tract that is one and a half acres on Eagle’s Nest Ranch is priced at over $227,000. Even given the cost of bringing in utilities, this is way overpriced. The market value of mountain land in this area right now is around $20,000 per acre.

If you purchase from Whitetail Properties, you will be ripped off. And that’s before the ridiculous post-CoVid19 cost of building a moderately-sized cabin.

Speaking of market value…

The housing bubble has arrived twelve years late!

We were living in the Dallas area when the housing bubble burst happened back in the early 2000’s, and it missed Texas – and I think Oklahoma – completely.

I’m no economist, but it seems to have arrived here now. When we bought our southeast Oklahoma property in 2011, we paid $3800 an acre for a piece of the beautiful mountains. Now, you’re lucky if you can find anyone asking for under $20,000 an acre. While housing prices in Dallas haven’t gone up by five times since 2011, they have more than doubled.

Yes, some of this can be blamed on Biden’s acceleration of inflation. But not all of it.

Let me give you a hint about southeast Oklahoma land: it ain’t worth $20,000 an acre. You can’t grow food unless you spend a lot of money amending the soil, or buying a lot of bagged potting mix – and then most of what you might try to grow is likely to die of some sort of fungus. If you want land for hunting, well, how many deer are there going to be with developers creating small towns in the mountains? Besides, with the current cost of land being what it is, you’d save money staying where you are and buying deer meat for the rest of your life!

If you purchase a tract from Eagle’s Nest Ranch – or anywhere in southeast Oklahoma, really – then decide to sell in a few years, there’s a chance that you will lose money.

“But it’s beautiful country! The view is worth it!”

Trust me. If you’re thinking about leaving the city because you’re tired of seeing a brick wall every time you look out a window, you may eventually get tired of the forest view, too. Even if you wouldn’t, you need to decide if a “view” is really worth overpaying in a market that might be about to burst. You may be better off saving your money to go on more vacations.

Especially when you realize the truth of the next issue…

Southeast Oklahoma don’t got no shopping malls or Whole Foods.

Another boasting point on the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website is that the properties are “only” two and a half hours from either the north Dallas area or Tulsa. That’s two and a half hours to get to a decent department store. Two and a half hours to a Whole Foods. An entire day, and five hours sitting in a car, just to buy groceries or a new, quality dress.

“I don’t shop at Whole Foods. I’ll just go to the local grocery store.”

All right, then you can come to my house and tell me if they have stopped selling wilting lettuce, carrots that have begun to rot in the bag, and moldy grapes.

Yes, it’s that bad.

The closest place that sells decent groceries is either in Antlers or Wilburton, both nearly an hour’s drive from Eagle’s Nest Ranch. Walmart is about the same distance in the city of Mcalester, but take it from me, if you’re used to a chain as even as humble as a Tom Thumb or Kroger, Walmart produce and frozen foods won’t cut it.

Oh, and by the way, grocery delivery services don’t come this far out, and the nearest Azure Standard pickup is over an hour away, and run by a family who will try to give you religious tracts that tell you you’re not saved unless you’re following the laws in the Old Testament book of Leviticus.

McAlester does, thank heavens, have a Lowes, but if you love Target or prefer Home Depot, they are at least an hour and a half away.

Clayton has one beauty salon, a variety store that charges up to five times the market value for the items that they sell, and a hardware store whose tools aren’t always the best quality. If you want to eat out at a halfway decent place, again, we’re talking an hour and a half drive to Paris, Texas.

Don’t care about that? You say you’ll just order everything from Amazon and eat homemade meals? Fine, that’s what we do, too. But think about this: how long do you think those shale-based roads are going to last with UPS trucks going over them every day to deliver to everyone in your treeless mountain subdivision?

Besides, UPS won’t deliver handymen or A/C servicemen to your door. And when you finally find one who will come all the way out there, you may wait a week or more to get whatever repairs you need done, done. That goes for plumbers and any other contracting service, as well.

Speaking of UPS and roads…

The county won’t melt the ice and snow for you.

We usually have a decent sleet, ice, or snowstorm every winter. The higher up you live in the mountains, the colder it is, and the longer it takes for everything to melt – several days longer than it does in the DFW metroplex.

And the county isn’t going to give the suckers residents on Eagle’s Nest Ranch special treatment. When you live in these mountains, it’s possible to be stuck on your property for several days after a winter storm.

Secluded? Not so much.

The Eagle’s Nest Ranch website promises seclusion for its new owners. However, none of the tracts are much larger than two acres. You can only get so far away from your neighbor on two acres.

We live on five acres, yet we can see two of our neighbor’s homes from our house. That’s even with all of us having obeyed another one of the developer’s agreements on the sales contract, to build a house not closer than 100 feet to any boundary, and with having thick copses of trees between us. And I’m guessing Whitetail Properties isn’t making anyone agree to any such thing. You might build your house on what you believe to be the best site on your acreage, and your new neighbor could come along and build their house right across from yours.

Also, how “secluded” is a 48-tract development, with all the tracts being small and hitting up against each other, with no trees in sight? 

Here’s another gem the Whitetail Realtors won’t tell you about, even if they know about it: There is an ammunition dump just outside of McAlester, on the south side. Two to five times a month, they blow up ammunition underground. We can not only hear the explosions, but sometimes feel the tremors which the detonation causes. Eagle’s Nest Ranch is located a little closer to that reverberation than where me and my husband live.

The locals already don’t like you.

No one around here likes Whitetail Properties. Some still aren’t happy, ten years after the fact, that people like me and my husband bought mountain land, though we’ve done our best to maintain the natural environment. I can only imagine the hostility that owners of Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties are going to face by the Clayton, Oklahoma locals. They want their small town, rural community environment to stay that way, not turn into a suburb full of wealthy people who don’t care about preserving the land.

Then there are these other issues...

If you live in the DFW area and suffer from allergies, they'll be five times worse in southeast Oklahoma. Why? Two reasons. First, higher humidity. Second, trees. A lot of them. Assuming Whitetail Properties doesn't eventually cut them all down.

Lots of trees plus high humidity equals allergy symptoms for much of, if not most of, the year.

For post-menopausal women, it's even worse. 

Note the higher humidity I just mentioned. If you don't like the humidity during the summer in Dallas, you'll hate it in southeast Oklahoma.

And if you've never lived in the South before, and are thinking, "I don't have allergies! I'll be fine!", ask any Northern ex-pat and you'll discover that we ALL developed allergy problems after moving to the South. If you want to move to a warmer clime, try Tennessee or some other semi-southern state that reports low allergies.

The ball is in your court.

You now know that Whitetail Properties is not as ethical a company as they claim to be. You know that if you purchase a tract on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma, you will be supporting the destruction of natural habitat, including the cruel death and displacement of innocent animals.

In addition, having to drive five hours round-trip to experience culture – concerts, orchestras, community theater – gets old fast.

You need to decide: will you take the moral high ground, or not? Do you really want to be a part of the systemic, ongoing bulldozing of nature and habitat, when you already live in a perfectly good house with all the amenities that you could ever want within easy reach?

Living in the country, even one with a view of mountain forests, is not nearly as romantic as the people running Whitetail Properties want you to believe it is.

Introducing My First Early Childhood Education Series!

 Are you looking for fun ways to teach your young child various different concepts? Whether you homeschool or not, if you have children under the age of nine, my little books offer fun and engaging ways to learn the basics. 

My first series, “Billy Bear Learns Adding,” teaches tricks on how to add one, two, three, four, and five. The books, which consist of rhymes, could even be used for reading practice! More importantly, however, they provide a foundation for doing mental math. I have just published that series, and the books are available in both ebook and paperback format.

Following are the book covers for each book in the series. Click each image to get to the product page on Amazon.

A couple of notes.

Note #1: Should you purchase any or all of the books, please don’t throw me under the bus in your review of it because I used clip art. It would have cost me well over $3,000 PER BOOK to have them professionally illustrated. While I believe it’s important to have story books properly illustrated – especially those that are given a higher price tag – the point of my educational books are to educate, not to entertain.

Speaking of price tags…

Note #2: I want to be clear about this because I know that a lot of people look at the prices of books these days and get sticker shock. In some cases, I do, too, and I can tell you with certainty that many self-published authors overprice their products simply because they want to make more money, not because the products are worth the price tag. So I want to explain the cost of not only the “Billy Bear” books, but those that I will publish in the future.

I have priced the ebooks as cheaply as Amazon will let me. I wanted to price them at 99 cents, but I guess because of all the graphics, that price point was too low given the cost to send pictures digitally. Therefore, they each cost $1.99.

The paperback books I have priced only 99 cents more than the lowest price Amazon allows per book, making their print price $7.99 each. Because of the lack of those kinds of books, and those that I will be creating in the future, I wanted to make them as affordable as possible for parents. Print-on-demand is much more costly than mass printing.

For each e-book purchase, I will make a whopping seventy cents. For each print book purchase, I will make eleven cents fewer than that. 

Thank you for understanding, and thanks in advance for considering them for your children’s educational needs. Follow me to stay informed about my future publications.

I DID IT!

I finally finished the novel which inspired this post, this post, and this post. I even have a title for it: 'Tis the Season for Surprises. 

Every novel in this holiday romance series has a title related to a Christmas song. 

You have to understand, since The Envelope, my very first novel, it has never, never, NEVER taken me this long to write a novel. It usually takes me six weeks or fewer.

This one? I started it back in November. I've abandoned it for weeks two or three times. I only finished it because I just couldn't ditch the series when I'd already completed half of it. I stopped telling myself the story wasn't working, and made it work.

I have but the final run-through to polish it up. 

I'll be writing the fourth and final book in this series by late summer, and will be publishing the series in October. In the meantime, I'll be working on other projects that are not romance novels, because I need a serious break from the genre. 

Was It Just a "Honeymoon Phase"?; or, My Enthusiasm for Writing Romance Is Underwhelming

UPDATE, THE VERY NEXT DAY AFTER I PUBLISHED THIS POST:

I have resumed working on the romance novel in question. The fact is, I don't hate either reading or writing romance. Usually. But my brain goes in cycles. And because I'm autistic and think at every moment that the way things are now is the way they'll also be, well... the result is thoughts as you are about to read.

There is more to it than that, which I will write about later. For now, suffice to say that the following article is a good illustration of a brain which is commonly labeled with the insufficient and not quite accurate label of ADHD. A good illustration of how the neurodivergent brain can seriously mess with its owners.

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 Ever since I was little, I've loved writing stories. In grade school, where my peers would write a paragraph to fulfill a story assignment, I would write multiple pages. Even as young as third grade. If the mainstream culture bearing down on me had encouraged it rather than cautioned against it, I likely would have gone to school for either a music degree or whatever degree would have taught me how to write quality fiction.

As a sophomore in college, I wrote what I know now was a terrible novella. I wrote a few short stories, as well. When I got out of college, I even shopped a couple of them around.

No takers.

But, no matter, because by then, I’d convinced myself that I wanted a career as an elementary school teacher, and lasered in on achieving that goal.

I was twenty-nine years old before I began writing fiction again. I began with short stories for children’s magazines. After receiving multiple rejections, I decided to try my hand at writing a novel. After all, that was where the real money was. And by that time, I was desperate to get out of the educational system, having realized several years prior that being a classroom teacher wasn’t, and never could be, what I’d imagined it was when I first set out to get my degree.

Other than a fake literary agent who scammed me out of $200, I had no takers for my first grown-up novel, either. However, in 2004 I attended a writer’s conference where an editor of a small Christian publishing house (which no longer exists) encouraged me. Though they couldn’t publish it because they only published two novels per year, he told me that “someone should publish it.”

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

Though by my early thirties, I was dreaming of living in the country, living a quiet life where I’d spend my days writing novels and communing with nature, my sole motive for getting published at that time was to make more money than I did at my teaching job and thus be able to quit my job.

In other words, though I loved to write, I was writing novels because I wanted to make money, and a lot of it.

A decade after that writer’s conference, having built up a large enough nest egg to do so, my husband quit his job (I’d quit mine when I got pregnant) after we’d spent some time organizing our finances and choosing an amount we believed would finance a frugal lifestyle. But those first years living on five wooded acres, I didn’t trust God to provide, was anxious about what might happen to our investments, so when I learned about self-publishing on Amazon, I returned to writing novels. Romance novels, because those were the kind that sold the best.

In other words, I wrote with the sole motivation of making money.

Are you getting the picture here?

But focus on money wasn’t the half of it.

It might have been that God had called me to write romance novels, but my motivations had gotten skewed. Or it might have been that I had divine permission to write anything within the bounds of His teachings, as long as I was using the writing talent He’d given me.

But if either of those have been true, I'm not sure they're true now. Why?

I haven't enjoyed writing romance in a long time. During the past few years, there have been characters that I fell in love with, and certain scenes that I had fun writing, but overall, since 2018 or 2019, writing romance stories has felt like drudgery. I've also had an increasingly harder time finding romance novels that I truly enjoy reading. Around the time of the pandemic, I began to prefer upmarket, non-romance women’s fiction stories, or intriguing or inspiring non-fiction. By then, I had a bunch of non-romance novel ideas swirling around in my head, as well. The reason I didn’t write them?

Self-published authors struggle to make money unless they write in one of the top genres, romance being at the pinnacle.

Ah, and here we arrive at another big issue: the tug to write a novel for traditional publishing has been slowly growing stronger. Though I've handed the desire over to the Lord several times, it keeps creeping back into my soul, poking at me a little harder every time.

And, quite frankly, I’ve been tired of the self-publishing game for several years. Probably since around 2018. Yet, I've kept pushing myself. I've had no joy in my days because I “had” to finish whatever novel I've been working on within six weeks of starting it.

And most of the time, that novel has been a romance. Which, at the moment, I don't even want to read.

Stronger than the desire to find a trad publisher has been the desire to return to God’s ultimate vocation on my life: as a teacher and encourager. In my head I've been hearing more and more descriptions of nature, stories of my experiences, explanations of how ABC helped problem XYZ.

I've been hearing myself write non-fiction. Essays. Spiritual growth books. And so on.

What it all comes down to.

God has called me to be a teacher and a writer, no question. But, a romance author? And, self-publishing? At the moment, I can't see myself writing romance anytime in the near future. I could be wrong. I've been wrong in making similar statements in the past, but I've never struggled with a novel before as I have with the last romance I tried to write. 

As far as self-publishing, well, I think I gave up on querying literary agents too soon twenty years ago. If nothing else, God has allowed me to torture myself writing romance in order to hone my craft, and that now, I’m skilled enough to create work that has a good chance of getting the attention of a quality literary agent.

I’m not saying I’ll never write another romance. And I could be wrong about the trad publishing thing. But at this stage in my life, romance novels – reading or writing them – do nothing to enrich my life at any level.

It’s past time that I take a few steps of faith and write the kind of books that God wants me to write, not the kind that I think will make the most money.

Which, by the way, have never netted me more than $3,000 a year. That was one time, and that's including all thirty of them.

In case you think it’s easy to make money as a self-published author.