When last I wrote we were just moving back home, to Aspen Ridge Ranch, then silence befell this journal. Was that because life at the ranch has been so full of adventure, rich in spiritual communing with nature and the cosmos, ladened with quiet time reading and sunbathing, deluged with ranch chores, just so chock-a-block with wild happenings that I haven’t had time to tell the stories?

 

Alas, the answer is no. Instead a few things changed with my book publicity business. Garth Stein’s new book, The Art Of Racing In The Rain, launched and is well on its way to becoming a huge national bestseller. Along with that Terra Com has been getting much more work from him than we expected. In addition, we started working directly for two publishers, a model I’ve been moving toward for some time, and with it comes more money and more work. My two associates have not been able to keep up with it all so I’ve basically been sitting at a computer, with my telephone headset atop my head, and working for 8 to 10 hours a day for weeks on end. I keep telling myself it is okay, “make hay while the sunshines,” but there hasn’t been much end in site. I’ve turned down a number of potential new clients, and several are pending and may be ones that are just too interesting, or profitable, to decline. I keep raising my fees, hoping to discourage new clients, but I guess I’ve been charging too little for years and even as I raise my rates, I still keep getting new requests.

 

We chose to move to the ranch because we wanted to save money, or more precisely, we wanted to live more simply and with fewer expenses so that we didn’t have to work at paying jobs so much of our lives. There is a definite pattern here that has established itself over the past 10 years. Whenever I decide to live true to my desires, to not worry about making money or putting effort toward that, to simplify…then really good money-making opportunities fall at my feet. How can I turn away good books to work with when my hourly rate is now twice what it was just a year ago. The theory is that the more new clients I take on, that are locked in at the higher rates, then I should make more money while working fewer hours. Unfortunately I feel an obligation to stick with my old, long term clients who aren’t having to pay the higher rates, so the overall effect is that I just have lots more work to do, and a bit more money coming from the work.

 

I don’t know what it is about me but I get really depressed when I’m working at something that is only mildly fulfilling, for 40 hours a week. I realize most everyone in the US has to work at least this hard, and most and jobs that aren’t as cool or rewarding as mine, but I just want to write, do my photography, hike, bike, paddle, read, garden, think, talk, put effort toward relationships, go birding, and spend an hour or two a day sunbathing on my dock watching the water skeeters dance on the river. I’m not lazy. I go from dawn to dusk, but work that isn’t my passion is mundane. And when I’m mired in the mundane I start feeling like I’m wasting my life. It is so short as it is. I start having anxiety attacks, I get depressed, I can’t drag myself from bed, I eat and collapse at 8 PM to watch movies and escape reality. I love reality…when I’m living in it well.

 

I finally lost the will to keep at it after spending most of Saturday–of Memorial weekend–working, working, working. But since I’d been in Bend for the week, house sitting for my parents, I had to spend all day Sunday cleaning their home, then all day Monday cleaning our Bend house getting it ready for the next renter. I’m a good, meticulous housekeeper, but two days in a row of 6+ hours of house cleaning and I felt more mired in the mundane than ever.