Constructing My Parachute On The Way Down

It has begun.

What has begun?

The period of time whereupon my wife has left her job and will be a stay-at-home mother to our darling little wolverine tornado, B-Dub, and where I am the sole provider for the family.

This is awesome.

I do not say that snarkily. I say that with great oomphing trumpets. My chest is puffed out. My victorious plumage is on colorful display. My cloaca is flush with turgid triumph.

This is awesome.

It is awesome in the colloquial sense, as in, “This is great.”

It is also awesome in the proper sense of the word: awesome like a tsunami, like one’s imagined God, like a meteor made of flaming lions and electric guitars.

And in that proper sense, it is also terrifying.

Writing’s been good to me. But it’s not a job with a steady paycheck. It’s not universally considered to be a reliable, easy career. Again: it’s been good to me. I’ve little cause to worry at this stage in the game. But writers, as the saying goes, must be sharks. We gotta swim forward —

Or we drown.

As such, this is where I turn to you and I ask for your help.

I’m not looking for charity. We’re financially comfortable — “comfortable” in the sense we can pay all our bills without complaint, but also “comfortable” in the sense that one small tragedy could cut our legs out from under us — but really, we’re solid. Just the same, I need to keep doing this to survive, and keeping on keeping as a writer-type means having an audience there willing to catch me when I, well, make jumps like this one.

And catching me means a couple different things.

It means buying my books, for one. I just put up a bundle yesterday where you can get all my six author-published writing books for a mere ten bucks until the end of November.

Maybe you’d dig a woman who can see how you’re going to die just by touching them.

Or maybe you got a hankering for a corn-swept dystopian future full of adventure and turmoil and teenage tragedy.

Could be you’d like to read a story about a dude punching his way through the Secret Hell beneath the streets of Manhattan in search of his traitorous daughter.

Might be instead that you’d like to read about a teen girl going up against the institutionalized bullies of her town and trying to take down a dog-fighting ring.

Plus, you know, all those other writing books.

Point is: hey, options.

Now, I recognize that not everybody is flush with the kind of disposable cash that makes procuring entertainment easy or palatable, and that’s okay, too. In that case, I’d simply appreciate it if you told some folks about my books. Spread the word, as it were. Maybe write a review if you’ve read something of mine in the past. Anything to lubricate that whole “word-of-mouth” thing a little bit.

All this goes to helping keep me solvent as a writer. It helps pay bills and put food in the mouth of the toddler. And it helps keep this website around — as the site has grown, its hosting bills have grown with it, and these days it costs a pretty penny to keep her running.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for helping me stitch together the parachute as I plummet.

*shrieks in victory as I fall through someone’s barn*